Solving Search for Static Sites

Search on any site can be a complicated problem to solve. When it comes to static sites, however, the problem can be a lot more complicated since you want to limit how much JavaScript you send to the client and you need the search to be fast. Existing solutions were all problematic in this area. In this session, Liam Bigelow will introduce us to Pagefind, a new library that aims to make search for static sites both lightweight and performant.

Scaling Fully Static Search to Real-world Sites with Pagefind

Full text search is one of the last obstacles for fully static websites, often being the driver of heavy bandwidth usage, or the nucleation point for backend services making your site not-so-static. Pagefind is a new open source tool that solves these problems by baking a low-bandwidth client-side search into your static site, deployable on your existing static hosting. Join Liam Bigelow for a discussion on how Pagefind confidently scales with you, and a walkthrough of implementing a no-compromise search experience on a fully static website.

Liam Bigelow is a Senior Software Engineer at CloudCannon, where he leads development projects relating to open-source tooling for static websites. His current major projects are the static search tool Pagefind, and the component development workflow Bookshop (Hugo, Eleventy, Jekyll, and SvelteKit). He also enjoys writing gnarly unit tests for his colleagues.

More Awesome Sessions