Website development has gained a huge popularity due to the constant technological advancement. They play a crucial role in creating awareness and boosting online experience for companies and their target audiences.
In most of the success stories of brands, websites stay under the cover. However, they are the most powerful and significant tool to take your digital business to new heights.
Websites can be designed in two types with respect to development: static and dynamic. Static websites are “run of the mill” type websites that show the same information to every website visitor. On the flip side, dynamic websites generate specific and tailored information to every visitor. Dynamic websites are interactive, personalized and provide real-time information.
If you’re looking to add extra flair to your websites, look no further. This article will help you with all the answers to questions like: What are dynamic websites? How are dynamic and static websites different? How dynamic websites enhance the online presence of a brand due to their adaptable nature? And more.
Before diving deep into the intricate details, let’s first get to know what dynamic websites are.
What are Dynamic Websites?
Dynamic websites, as the name implies, are dynamic, interactive and adaptive in nature. Unlike static websites, which present the same content to all visitors, dynamic websites display unique and custom-made content. From the technical viewpoint, dynamic websites are based on advanced technologies and programming languages such as PHP, ASP, C#, Python and JavaScript.
The content on dynamic web pages is displayed in real-time. Every time a user interacts on a dynamic website, the content is generated based on the user’s preferences, inputs, geographical location, time, and language. This unique attribute of a dynamic website makes it ever-appealing, user-friendly and engaging for the target audience.
These days, most of the websites we come across are dynamic or employ a few basic dynamic features.
Think of an e-commerce website, for instance, whose home page makes product recommendations based on what it believes you will like to purchase. As a result, each visitor will see a somewhat altered home page. Naturally, it would be absurd to save a page on the server that was hardcoded for every visitor. Rather, content is determined by server-side programming, which then pulls it from many databases and creates a page based on it.
Additional use cases for dynamic content include showing a user’s past orders from your website once they sign in, altering the page language based on their region or settings, and limiting certain information on your site based on their membership status.
Key Differences Between Dynamic & Static Websites
By far, you must have got an idea about dynamic and static websites. Now, let’s break down some important differences between the two.
- Personalization
Static websites display specific web pages with pre-designed layouts and are not affected by user interactions and engagements. When a user opens a static website, it appears the same, irrespective of the user’s location, preferences or any other factors.
On the other hand, dynamic websites deliver personalized content based on the data received from the user’s end. They are also called data-driven sites as they allow users to interact with websites in real-time. The interaction can be in the form of custom recommendations, replies or comments and helps the website owner to work on improvement areas.
- Database Integration
Static websites are simple platforms and depict significant limitations and constraints for a business. They are fixed and do not change in real-time based on data updates from users. Moreover, it is a huge challenge to manage large volumes of data such as product catalogs and user information as they do not have a proper back-end database to store and retrieve data.
In dynamic websites, businesses may manage and update massive amounts of data, including product listings, customer information, and inventories in real-time by integrating them with databases.
- Interactivity
No interactive elements are incorporated in static websites such as forms, user logins, or comment sections. Due to this, these websites are less engaging and less user-friendly.
On the flip side, dynamic websites tend to tailor each visitor’s experience by gauging behavior through various interactive features such as user accounts, multimedia elements, shopping carts and forms etc.
- Scalability
It is a hassle to scale a static website. It requires manual intervention while dealing with large volumes of data.
Dynamic websites offer an empowered and impactful experience for users by managing vast data sets. This feature of dynamic websites makes it an ideal choice for large and growing businesses.
- Loading Speed
Loading speed of static websites is faster as compared to dynamic websites. The reason being that the content is already built and presented to the users’ browsers with no need of server-side processing.
We can simply say that dynamic website loading time is slower than static websites. It is definitely slightly slower because they require server side processing.
