๐ง๐ต๐ถ๐ ๐๐ ๐ช๐ต๐ ๐ ๐ฆ๐๐ผ๐ฝ๐ฝ๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐จ๐๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ฆ๐๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐ฐ ๐ฆ๐ถ๐๐ฒ ๐๐ฒ๐ป๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐ผ๐ป ๐ณ๐ผ๐ฟ ๐๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ด๐ฒ ๐ก๐ฒ๐ ๐.๐ท๐ ๐ฃ๐ฟ๐ผ๐ท๐ฒ๐ฐ๐๐ For years, Static Site Generation felt like the obvious choice for SEO-focused websites. You pre-render everything, serve static HTML, and enjoy fast page loads. This works well until your site grows beyond a few hundred pages.
When building a software comparison platform, I ran into a problem: every new record in the database could generate dozens of new pages. What started as a few hundred URLs quickly became thousands. At that point, traditional static generation started becoming a bottleneck rather than an advantage.
You may have a site with:
- 150 software products
- Individual product pages
- Alternatives pages
- Category pages
- Comparison pages The total URL count grows fast. The challenge is not serving the pages, but rebuilding them. If every deployment requires regenerating thousands of pages, build times become unacceptable.
I moved most pages to dynamic rendering backed by a PostgreSQL database. The application uses Next.js App Router, Route Handlers, Server Components, and PostgreSQL via Supabase. A route receives a slug and retrieves the relevant record.
Many developers assume dynamic rendering means slow rendering. In practice, database query optimization matters far more than rendering strategy. The biggest improvements come from proper indexing, eliminating unnecessary queries, caching common lookups, and reducing over-fetching.
One advantage of dynamic rendering is metadata generation. Every page can generate unique metadata directly from database fields. This allows thousands of pages to maintain unique titles and descriptions without manual intervention.
You can check out a project where I applied this approach: SoftwareDuel, a software comparison platform that relies heavily on dynamic routes and structured data. Source: https://dev.to/vs7ironman/why-i-stopped-using-static-site-generation-for-large-nextjs-projects-3d9i