Static HTML

A hand-built HTML site is the strongest possible starting position. No hydration, no runtime, no framework deciding what renders. Crawlers see exactly what you wrote.

Which means when a static site scores badly, it is never the architecture. It is the housekeeping.

The four things static sites forget

1. Dates that are never updated. A page last edited in 2023 with no date at all is unjudgeable. Add a <time> element and keep it honest.

<p class="meta">Updated <time datetime="2026-07-31">31 July 2026</time></p>

2. The sitemap generated once. If you are adding pages by hand, add them to the sitemap by hand, or generate it in your build. A sitemap listing eleven of your forty pages is actively misleading.

3. No author entity. Static sites are often personal or small-team and end up anonymous. Add a Person to your Article schema and give that person a real page.

4. Schema copy-pasted between pages without editing. The classic: forty pages all declaring the same headline. Worse than none.

The full head block for a static page

<title>How to quote a job in five minutes | Fernway</title>
<meta name="description" content="Quote a standard job from site in about five minutes. The four-step flow, with the template setup that makes it fast.">
<link rel="canonical" href="https://fernway.co/guides/quote-fast/">
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@graph": [
    { "@type": "Organization", "@id": "https://fernway.co/#org",
      "name": "Fernway", "url": "https://fernway.co" },
    { "@type": "Article",
      "headline": "How to quote a job in five minutes",
      "datePublished": "2026-03-11",
      "dateModified": "2026-07-31",
      "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Sam Whitely" },
      "publisher": { "@id": "https://fernway.co/#org" } }
  ]
}
</script>

The @graph pattern lets you declare several entities in one block and reference them by @id. Use it — it is cleaner than three separate scripts.

A build step is worth it

Once you pass about ten pages, hand-maintaining the head block across files becomes the source of every error. A tiny generator — even fifty lines of Python — that stamps the same shell onto every page will keep you consistent. This site is built exactly that way, and the generator is in the repo.