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System Design Masterclass · Web Content Delivery
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The React documentation site (react.dev) gets millions of visits per month. It has no application server. No database queries at request time. No serverless functions processing each visit. Every page is a plain HTML file sitting on a .
The entire site is built once during deployment. Markdown files are compiled to HTML, bundled with CSS and JavaScript, and uploaded to Cloudflare's edge network. When you visit any page, the nearest CDN edge node returns the pre-built HTML in under 50ms. The "server" is just a file system.
This is static site generation. You render every page at build time, deploy the resulting files to a CDN, and serve them at the speed of a file read. No per-request computation. No database. No server scaling. The fastest possible way to deliver a web page.
During the build step, the SSG framework (Next.js, Gatsby, Astro, Hugo) does the following for each page:
After the build, you have a folder of .html files, plus CSS, JS, and images. Deploy that folder to any or static host (Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, S3 + CloudFront, GitHub Pages) and you are done.
Build times scale with page count. A 100-page blog builds in seconds. A 50,000-product e-commerce catalog takes 15-30 minutes. This is the core trade-off of SSG: build time grows linearly with content volume.
Next.js generateStaticParams tells the framework which pages to pre-build. For this platform (754 system design lessons), we call generateStaticParams to produce all lesson paths at build time. Each lesson page is pre-rendered as static HTML and cached on the CDN. Build time: about 3-5 minutes for all 754 pages.