render.lab
Based on sanj.ninja/blog →

Request Lifecycle

Press Run to animate the request lifecycle
🖥️
Browser
⚡
CDN / Edge
🏢
Origin Server
Step details will appear here during simulation.

Timeline

01.3s total

Scenario

🏠Marketing Site✓ Great fit

Content is near-static. Pre-built pages served instantly from CDN edge.

All strategies for: 🏠 Marketing Site

Static Site Generation

Pre-built at deploy time, served from CDN edge

HTML is generated at build time. Your server doesn't render anything at request time - it just serves pre-built files from a CDN edge node near the user.

Where it shines

  • ✓Ultra-fast TTFB - CDN serves cached HTML without touching a server
  • ✓Excellent SEO - crawlers receive full HTML immediately
  • ✓Zero server cost per request - no compute on every visit
  • ✓Lowest infrastructure costs of any strategy

Trade-offs

  • △Content is stale until the next build and deploy
  • △Build times grow with page count (100k pages = slow builds)
  • △Not suitable for personalised or frequently changing data

Common use cases

BlogsMarketing sitesDocumentationPortfolio sitesLanding pages

Simulated Metrics

TTFB80ms
FCP200ms
LCP350ms
TTI500ms
98
SEO
Crawlability
99
Freshness
Content age
95
Infra cost
Lower = cheaper
⏱Estimated build time: 660ms for 20 pages

Configuration

1d

How often your content updates. Affects whether cached pages go stale.

80ms

Time for the server to fetch data from the database.

120KB

Total JavaScript shipped to the browser. Directly hurts CSR performance.

1hr

How long ISR keeps a cached page before triggering a background regeneration.

20

Total pages in the site. Affects SSG and ISR build times.

5k

Affects SSR infrastructure costs and CDN pressure.

Article

Yet Another Front-end Rendering Strategies Article

A practical guide to SSR, CSR, SSG, ISR and PPR - written by Sanjeev Srithevan.

Read the article →