The case for zero servers
Every marketing site we audit shares the same pathology: a CMS-rendered page taking 800ms at origin before a byte reaches the visitor, then a waterfall of plugins fighting for the main thread. The fix isn't a faster server — it's no server. Next.js static export pre-renders every route to plain HTML at build time and ships it to a CDN edge. Time-to-first-byte drops to whatever the nearest edge node can do, which is usually under 100ms anywhere on earth.
The second-order effects matter more than the speed. There's no origin to patch, no runtime to exploit, no scaling bill that grows with traffic. A traffic spike from a viral post costs pennies. And because the HTML is fully formed at build time, what Google crawls is exactly what users see — no rendering-budget roulette.
What you give up, and how to get it back
Static export removes server-side machinery: no API routes, no middleware, no per-request personalization. Forms POST to an external endpoint — a form backend or a small serverless function that validates spam controls and fans out to your CRM, email, and Slack. Search runs on a build-time index like Pagefind. Image optimization moves to the build pipeline.
In practice these constraints are a feature. They force every dynamic behavior to justify itself, and the answer is usually a build-time or client-side pattern that's faster anyway. The one genuine dealbreaker is per-request personalization at scale — if you need that, you need a different architecture, and it's better to know on day one.
The numbers from production
Across the last eight static-export launches, median mobile LCP sits at 1.2s, CLS under 0.02, and every site passed Core Web Vitals within its first CrUX window. Lighthouse budgets are enforced in CI, so regressions fail the pull request instead of the quarter's SEO. Hosting for the largest of these sites — about 400 routes — costs less than a coffee per month.
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