Hand-coded websites hosted on Netlify

Most small business websites run on software that assembles each page when someone requests it. A static site skips that step, and that one difference drives most of what is good and limiting about it. Netlify builds are one of three platforms in our website builds practice.

Below: what a static site is, what Netlify's and Google's documentation say about speed and security, how edits, forms, and redirects work, and who it suits.

What a static site is

A static site is a set of finished files (HTML, CSS, images, and a small amount of JavaScript where a page needs it) that the host delivers exactly as written. Nothing is pulled from a database at the moment a visitor arrives. Netlify makes the same point from the other direction in a 2020 post on static site generators: once the pages are generated ahead of time, visitors never interact with the machinery that produced them.

Our Netlify builds are hand-coded, so each page's markup is written for that page rather than produced by a page builder. Hand-coded is not the same as hard to change; it means changes happen in code, made by someone who writes it. A fictional dental practice in Ohio would get one page for each procedure it actually performs, with headings and structured data written for that procedure instead of a shared template.

Speed, security and upkeep

Speed matters partly because Google measures it from real-world use. Its Core Web Vitals cover loading, interactivity, and visual stability, and web.dev sets the targets as Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less. Google's web.dev guidance says to assess those at the 75th percentile of page loads, segmented by mobile and desktop. Google recommends good Core Web Vitals for success with Search and says they align with what its core ranking systems seek to reward. It does not say a good score earns a top position, and neither do we.

A static site removes one common source of delay. Google's web.dev guidance on Time to First Byte explains that HTML generated at build time can be sent right away, while a server building pages on request may first need costly database lookups. Oversized images and heavy scripts can still slow any site down. On security, the same Netlify post argues that static sites have a strong security profile because the infrastructure serving them is simpler and leaves very few vectors for attack. Netlify also offers free HTTPS on all sites, provisioning Let's Encrypt certificates for custom domains and renewing them automatically.

Upkeep is light because there is no content management system, theme, or plugin stack waiting for patches. Netlify versions every deploy, and its documentation describes rollbacks as instantaneous: a previous deploy can be published again as the live site with one button, which makes a bad change quick to undo.

Edits, forms and redirects

On a hand-coded site, edits go through Hudson South. There is no dashboard where a staff member rewrites a paragraph at night. Before choosing, ask whoever handles the website now, "How many changes did we make last year, and how many of them could have waited a day?" If the honest answer is a handful of planned updates, sending them to us is a small adjustment. If someone on your team edits pages every week, WordPress or Squarespace is the better match.

Forms work without a separate form service. Netlify's documentation explains that, once form detection is turned on, its build system parses a site's HTML at deploy time and detects forms carrying a netlify attribute, with no extra API calls or JavaScript required, and submissions then appear in the site's Netlify admin panel. Our builds email form submissions to the business. Netlify recommends giving the form a field named email so the notification's reply-to address is the person who filled it in. The same documentation carries one caveat: a form rendered in the browser by JavaScript will not be found in the pre-built files.

Redirects live in a plain text _redirects file or in the site's Netlify configuration file, and Netlify applies a 301 status by default. When an existing site moves to Netlify, old addresses are kept or redirected, which is how hudsonsouth.ai was handled in its October 2026 move from Squarespace.

Who a Netlify build fits, and who it doesn't

It fits a business whose site changes in planned batches rather than daily: a fictional CPA firm in Raleigh that revises its services page a few times a year, or a manufacturer whose spec pages change only when products do. It fits owners who would rather never think about plugin updates or security patches. Edit requests go best when they arrive with the facts attached, such as a new service's real scope or a credential and the body that issued it, because our writers should not have to guess at what your business knows. A hand-coded site makes that kind of handoff the normal routine.

It fits poorly when a team publishes several posts a week and wants to do it in-house, when staff expect to rearrange page layouts themselves, or when the owner wants to log in at 10 p.m. and change something without waiting on anyone. Choosing WordPress or Squarespace in those cases is not a downgrade. The security comparison gets its own treatment in are static sites more secure than WordPress.