Sanity | The Composable Content Cloud
The Best CMS for Static Sites
Enjoy a fast, secure front end and a developer-friendly, endlessly customizable back end with Sanity's powerful content platform, built from the ground up to support static sites.
Add CMS functionality to your static site
With their simplicity and flexibility, static sites are a great choice for content-heavy brands like publications, ecommerce stores, and media sites. When coupled with a content management system built to integrate with static site generators (SSGs), static sites enable teams to achieve the best of both worlds.
Static sites are made of mostly pre-generated file assets, meaning it's faster to load the content over the Internet to the end-user. As a result, these sites can be optimally performant, secure, and developer-friendly.
How do static sites work with a CMS?
A static site CMS is a decoupled platform built to wire up easily to static site generators. Typically, the CMS exposes an API that the SSG consumes to generate its pages.
Static site CMSes like Sanity come with easy-to-use, fully-featured libraries for a variety of languages. This enables fast, customized connections to SSGs, as well as a user-friendly back-end studio.
When that backend is connected to the SSG in this way, the back end plays no role in front-end presentation. This architecture provides unparalleled flexibility, making static site generators a powerful tool for developers, editorial and marketing teams, and e-commerce platforms.
Benefits of a static site CMS
A headless content platform like Sanity provides a simple CMS for static websites that content creators can work with, along with a variety of major benefits.
You can make your website blazingly fast
- Generate performant landing pages quickly and easily.
- Deliver assets closer to your users with a content delivery network (CDN).
- SSGs can query the headless API at build time to create lightning fast static files, so each page has a small data footprint and can travel quickly.
Your marketing team can set more ambitious goals
- Publications and blogs can hit publishing targets faster.
- With an easily customizable back-end studio, your marketing team can control the entire editorial pipeline, from ideation and scheduling to publishing and deploying new content to production.
Establish a single source of truth for content
Since you can serve the back end to any platform that can consume an API, you can treat the CMS as the centralized location for your content, with a customizable content model that can be queried for multiple purposes.
Both front and back end are safer
- Because your front end is only HTML and CSS, there are fewer entry points for a would-be attacker.
- With role-based access control on your back end, your data is only accessible to people who have the specified permissions.
Enjoy a feast of integrations
- Extend the functionality of the back end with third-party code.
- E-commerce sites can unify their entire back end into Sanity's extensible content platform. Inventory, sales data, marketing data, and content—all in one place.
Get started fast with Sanity
Sanity fully supports all major SSGs, including Hugo, Next.js, Eleventy, and Nuxt. Get started with one-click starter installs and spin up a functioning blog, portfolio, or marketing site in minutes. Sanity's static CMS is the fastest, most powerful way to build and ship digital content.
Sanity is #1 in developer experience
Jochai von Baumgarten
Product Manager @ MyLaerdal
Our tight project timeline meant that we had to develop our code and content in parallel. This is a very difficult problem to solve, and would have been a lot worse if it weren’t for Sanity’s flexibility. It would have been much more difficult with a heavier, traditional content system.
Artem Artemov
Staff Product Designer @ Twitter
Since I started dev/design with the JAMstack I think I have played around with every headless CMS. Sanity has so far been the quickest to understand, set up, and get any kind of support on from the community. Lots of fun to have when things just... work.
Michael Cacciano
Full Stack Developer @ Zoetis
Most of my experience with a CMS has been working the front end in Sitecore and AEM, which I tend to find bland for my taste. Then came Gatsby and Sanity... I may be in love!
Sanity: a vital addition to your content stack
Sanity's powerful toolset enables developers to build a fully customized content platform for use with static sites. Its APIs can be queried by any front-end framework, and its innovative approach to structured content enables rich, interrelated data types to serve content to unlimited front-end presentations. Just write a quick schema in a JavaScript file to populate your content back end with the structured data you need.
Upgrade your back-end experience with Sanity's custom query language GROQ, an open-source rich text format Portable Text, and global CDN for assets.
See why Sanity was rated the best CMS for static websites by the JamStack community survey.
Last updated February 9, 2023