I built this website — the one you're reading right now — as a static HTML site deployed on Cloudflare Pages. No React. No Next.js. No build step. Just HTML, CSS, and a git push. And here's the thing: this isn't a quirky retro choice anymore. In 2026, this is increasingly becoming the smart choice for a huge category of websites.

Web development has gone through some fascinating shifts in the past couple of years, and I want to talk about what's actually changed — not the hype-cycle stuff, but the real, practical changes that affect how sites get built, deployed, and experienced. As someone who builds sites and works in digital marketing in San Diego's growing tech scene, I've had a front-row seat to these changes.

The Static Site Comeback

For years, the web development world was on a one-way train toward more complexity. Static sites were for beginners; real developers used React with server-side rendering, or Next.js with incremental static regeneration, or some other multi-layered architecture that required a PhD in configuration to deploy.

Then something shifted. Developers started asking: does this blog really need a JavaScript framework? Does this marketing site really need client-side hydration? Does this portfolio really need a 400KB runtime just to display some text and images?

The answer, increasingly, is no. And the platforms that make static deployment trivially easy have matured to the point where there's almost no friction. Cloudflare Pages, Vercel, Netlify, GitHub Pages — you push HTML to a git repo, and it's live on a global CDN in seconds. No servers to manage, no scaling to worry about, no infrastructure costs that grow with traffic.

I'm not saying frameworks are dead — they're not. React, Vue, and Svelte are all thriving for applications that actually need interactivity. But there's been a healthy correction toward using the right tool for the job. A blog doesn't need React. A marketing site doesn't need Next.js. A portfolio doesn't need Nuxt. Plain HTML with some CSS works beautifully for content sites, and the performance difference is staggering.

The Numbers Don't Lie

This site loads in under 0.5 seconds on a 4G connection. No JavaScript payload. No hydration delay. No layout shift. The entire page is rendered by the time the browser finishes downloading the HTML. Compare that to a typical Next.js site, which ships 150-400KB of JavaScript and takes 1.5-3 seconds to become fully interactive on the same connection.

For content sites where the primary user action is reading, that performance gap directly impacts engagement, bounce rates, and — if you care about this — search rankings. Google's Core Web Vitals explicitly measure loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability. Static HTML sites ace all three metrics by default.

AI-Assisted Coding: The Real Impact

Every article about web development in 2026 mentions AI coding tools, but most of them either overhype ("AI will replace developers!") or underhype ("it's just autocomplete"). The reality, as usual, is more nuanced.

What AI Coding Tools Actually Do Well

What AI Coding Tools Don't Do Well

My Workflow

I use AI coding tools daily — primarily Claude and GitHub Copilot. My workflow has evolved to: design the architecture myself, use AI for implementation, review everything critically. This has roughly doubled my output speed for standard web development tasks. I'm not twice as productive overall — the architecture and review steps take the same time — but the implementation phase is dramatically faster.

The most important skill for a developer in 2026 isn't writing code from scratch — it's reviewing AI-generated code effectively. Being able to read code critically, spot subtle bugs, evaluate architectural decisions, and understand performance implications is more valuable than typing speed ever was.

Performance-First: Core Web Vitals and Beyond

Google's Core Web Vitals (CWV) have been a ranking factor since 2021, but in 2026 they matter more than ever — partly because Google has gotten more aggressive about penalizing poor performance, and partly because user expectations have risen. People have become accustomed to fast sites and have zero patience for slow ones.

The three CWV metrics that matter:

What I've noticed in 2026 is that the performance gap between the best and worst sites has widened. Sites built with modern practices — static generation, optimized images, minimal JavaScript — achieve near-perfect CWV scores effortlessly. Sites still running bloated WordPress themes with 15 plugins, unoptimized images, and third-party script soup are falling further behind.

The practical takeaway: performance is a competitive advantage that most sites still don't exploit. If your competitor's site takes 4 seconds to load and yours takes 1 second, you win — in user experience, in conversion rates, in search rankings, and in AI search citation likelihood.

The Rise of Edge Computing

Edge computing has gone from buzzword to practical reality in web development. The concept is simple: instead of running your server-side code in a single data center, run it on servers distributed across the globe, close to your users. The result is dramatically lower latency.

Cloudflare Workers, Vercel Edge Functions, Deno Deploy, and Netlify Edge Functions have made edge computing accessible to individual developers and small teams. You don't need to understand distributed systems theory to deploy a function that runs on 300+ servers worldwide — you just write the code and push it.

Practical Edge Computing Use Cases

I've started using Cloudflare Workers for small dynamic features on otherwise static sites — form handling, simple API integrations, redirect logic. It's the sweet spot: the performance of static sites with targeted interactivity where you need it.

What Hasn't Changed

For all the changes I've described, some fundamentals remain constant:

HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are still the platform. Every framework, every build tool, every abstraction layer eventually compiles down to these three technologies. Understanding them deeply is still the most durable web development skill you can have.

Accessibility still matters (and is still underinvested). Despite years of awareness campaigns, most sites still have significant accessibility issues. Semantic HTML, proper ARIA labels, keyboard navigation, color contrast — these fundamentals are as important as ever and still widely neglected.

Progressive enhancement still works. Build a baseline experience that works without JavaScript, then enhance it. This approach produces more resilient, more accessible, faster websites. It's been good advice for 20 years, and it's still good advice.

Simple beats complex when simple is sufficient. This is the meta-lesson of the static site comeback. The best architecture for a project is the simplest one that meets the requirements. Complexity should be a response to genuine needs, not a default starting point.

My Predictions for the Next Two Years

Since I'm already writing about the state of things, here's where I think web development is heading:

  1. AI will make the framework less important. When AI can convert your code between frameworks quickly and reliably, the choice of framework becomes less of a commitment and more of a preference. Framework lock-in will decrease.
  2. Web components will finally get their moment. Browser-native components that work without any framework. They've been available for years but underused. As the "simplify" trend continues, I expect web components to gain meaningful adoption.
  3. The JAMstack architecture will mature. Static sites + edge functions + third-party APIs is a pattern that works incredibly well. The tooling around this pattern will continue to improve, making it accessible to less technical users.
  4. Performance will become a business KPI. Not just a developer concern, but something that CMOs and CEOs track alongside conversion rates and revenue. The data connecting site speed to business outcomes is getting too strong to ignore.
  5. WordPress will bifurcate. WordPress will continue to dominate the CMS market for content-heavy sites, but an increasing share of "simple" sites will move to static solutions. WordPress will evolve toward being a headless CMS that powers static frontends.

What I'd Tell Someone Starting Out Today

If you're learning web development in 2026, here's my honest advice:

Start with HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript. Not a framework. Not a bootcamp that teaches you React on day one. Understand the platform first. Build a few sites with nothing but a text editor and a browser. You'll develop intuitions that framework-first developers never acquire.

Learn to deploy early. Set up a Cloudflare Pages or GitHub Pages site in your first week. The gap between "code on my laptop" and "live on the internet" should be closed immediately. Deploying isn't a late-stage skill — it's a fundamental one.

Embrace AI tools, but don't depend on them. Use Copilot, use Claude, use whatever AI coding tools are available. But always understand what the code does. The developers who thrive will be the ones who can use AI as a force multiplier on top of genuine understanding, not as a substitute for it.

Build things that matter to you. Personal projects, tools you actually use, sites for friends or local businesses. The portfolio projects that stand out are the ones with genuine purpose behind them — not another todo app or weather dashboard.

The web is still the most accessible, most democratic, most powerful platform for building things that reach people. The tools have changed. The fundamentals haven't. And that's what makes this a great time to be building for the web.