Why are ShopSite's static Web pages better?

When ShopSite generates the store, it creates the Web pages so that they are always present on your site. These are referred to as static pages. Other commerce packages generate the Web pages on-the-fly. These are called dynamic pages. The advantages of static pages are:

• Because they are always present, they can be indexed by search engines. A significant portion of customers find sites by using search engines. Dynamic Web pages may not be indexed by search engines such as Alta Vista, Infoseek, HotBot and others. Note this information from Google, the leading search engine:

"Reasons your site may not be included [indexed].

Your pages are dynamically generated. We are able to index dynamically generated pages. However, because our web crawler can easily overwhelm and crash sites serving dynamic content, we limit the amount of dynamic pages we index."

• Static Web pages are faster. When a customer clicks a link to a dynamic Web page, that page must first be created before the Web Server can send it to the customer's browser, which takes time. Static pages are ready to be served instantly.
• Hosting companies prefer static Web pages because they use less resource than dynamic pages. With dynamic pages, a database is constantly being accessed for every customer wanting to view a page. This takes server CPU cycles and means that the frequently accessed pages cannot be store in 'cache' (memory) on the server or on the customer's local browser (on disk).