---
title: Building static websites with Drupal
date: 2025-04-18
permalink: daily/2025/04/18/static-drupal
tags:
  - software-development
  - drupal
  - drupal-planet
cta: ~
snippet: |
  Did you know you can turn Drupal into a static site generator, getting the power of a flexible content management system and the performance and security benefits of a static website?
---

I've been using Drupal since 2008 and built the first version of my website with Drupal 6 before updating it to Drupal 7.

Around that time, I discovered static site generators and built the next version of my website with Jekyll.

I liked how I could write content in simple plain files, export them to HTML and upload them to a server.

Static websites are fast and secure.

There was no need for PHP or a database. Just a simple web server like Apache or Nginx that can serve static files.

I later switched to Sculpin, a static site generator written with PHP, which has a lot of similarities with Drupal.

But what if you want the power of Drupal with the benefits of a static website?

[Tome][0] is a module that turns Drupal into a static site generator.

Drupal works the same locally with access to all the usual core functionality and contrib modules and themes from Drupal.org, but you export everything to static files - the same as using Jekyll or Sculpin.

Sam Mortenson, the creator of the Tome module discussed it on [our episode of the Beyond Blocks podcast][1] where we also talked about single file components.

If you want the power of a flexible content management system and the performance and security benefits of a static website, Tome gives you the best of both worlds.

[0]: https://www.drupal.org/project/tome
[1]: {{site.url}}/podcast/19-sam-mortenson