Hardcoded vs dynamic content

There are different ways of building websites and none of them has the exclusivity of being “the universally correct way”. The discussion around hardcoded vs dynamic content and the right solution, always depends on context: the project goals, available resources, long‑term maintenance plans, and how will the website be used.

A bit of a history…

In “the old days” (mid 1990s and early 2000s), when World Wide Web became accessible to public, web pages looked a lot different than what they look today. There were no fancy animations and no videos in the hero section, people used dial-up to get to the Internet and it took them minutes to load a simple web page. Websites consisted of simple HTML pages with basic or no CSS. Websites were in most cases static, with limited or no interactivity. Publishing an article meant you had to convert your text into HTML and upload .html file to server. Everything was hardcoded and if you wanted to make a change due to a typo, or update your text, you needed to edit that .html file and re-upload it.

Technologies like CGI and PHP revolutionized web development by enabling server-side processing and making dynamic content possible. Websites could now retrieve data from databases, manage user input, and personalize content based on user interactions. This led to creation of first content management systems which included page templates and easier way to edit database entries.

Today, we have numerous content management systems which allow website owners and administrators to easily create and publish new pages without writing a single line of code, skills that were required couple of decades ago. Of course, this ease of use exists only because developers first had to design and code templates, blocks, fields, and page builders that make content editing possible and safe.

Why hardcode anything at all?

So, why would anyone want to go back to having anything hardcoded, if, thanks to modern CMSs, website admins can have whole website editable? Well, for one thing – resources, and the second – performance.

Performance, databases and resource costs

In most cases of modern content management systems, web pages are built from templates and multiple database entries that hold the content. Usually page content is not a single database entry, but rather multiple database records among different database tables. Depending on hosting, database optimization and complexity of database queries, as well as the website traffic, retrieving data from the database can be (and usually is) a real bottleneck.

Regarding resources, making parts of pages editable requires some additional coding.

Finding the right balance

So, the goal is to have number of database queries as low as possible. Obviously, from a purely technical standpoint, the easiest way to achieve that would be not to use database at all and have every page content hardcoded. But that doesn’t allow us to have dynamic content, and reusability of the content is pretty low. So, we need to find a sweetspot between having whole website hardcoded and having every single item on the website an entry in the database.

What content makes sense to hardcode?

The best way to do this is to determine which parts of content are not going to be changing in any near future or at all. This might be content of the website footer, links to social media, default images, content section wrappers, layout structures, hero images and videos, etc. Those elements can be hardcoded in page templates or template sections.

Why not make everything editable?

A common mistake in modern CMS projects is trying to make everything editable. Sure, that sounds client-friendly and is a good selling point for agencies, but, as mentioned above, it comes with a cost. Making every piece of content editable often results in over-complex admin interfaces, broken layouts, inconsistent branding, and higher long-term maintenance costs.

Final thoughts

Having all of this said, in the “hardcoded vs dynamic content” debate, the answer should be: it depends. To be honest, you should rarely have your whole website hardcoded, as it makes editing or adding new content hard. But you should always have website performance in mind and optimize your website. On the other hand, having some parts of website hardcoded can protect the website’s design from accidental errors.

In the end, it is the developer’s (or agency’s) job to make the right decision about the website’s structure and development strategy. In that way, a thoughtful content strategy at the start of a project often saves months of rework later.