What Is A Dynamic Website?

Date First Published: 31st August 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: Web Development

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 5/10

Learn more about what a dynamic website is in this article.

A dynamic website is one that has content that automatically changes each time it is accessed without the website owner having to manually update it. Dynamic websites are generated in realtime and can automatically show different content based on the time of day the visitor is viewing it, their location, what they visited before, their preferences, and more. Even though dynamic websites are much more complex to build than static websites, they are easier to maintain and update. Large websites are often dynamic as site-wide information that every page contains can be edited from one location rather than manually altering every HTML file.

Dynamic pages usually access information from a database. For example, a website might have a section containing the latest posts on every page. In order to update the latest posts, the website owner will only have to alter a database record. These types of dynamic websites may also be known as database-driven websites.

Client-Side and Server-Side Dynamic Pages

Dynamic pages come in two types, including client-side and server-side. Pages may sometimes use a combination of both client-side and server-side scripting to automatically update the content.

• Client-side dynamic pages - These use JavaScript to generate dynamic content. The JavaScript is processed by the web browser and can run after a webpage has been loaded without communicating with the web server. An example of a client-side dynamic page would be a page that has a JavaScript function to automatically display a different message based on the time of day the user is viewing the page.
• Server-side dynamic pages - These use server-side scripting languages, such as PHP, ASP, JSP, and Ruby to generate dynamic content that works on the backend. These scripts communicate with the web server before the webpage is displayed to the end user in order to generate dynamic content.

Advantages and Disadvantages Of Dynamic Websites

• They are easier to update. For example, if a website had different people contributing where they can submit an article, a script could be used to automatically update the homepage with those articles rather than having to manually edit a HTML page each time a new article is added.
• They can be used to personalise content to suit the user's needs and create a better experience for them. For example, visitors could automatically be shown different information based on their location.
• They are more interactive than static websites, since they can immediately respond to users and change according to their behaviour and habits.
• They make it easier for multiple people to contribute. CMSes, such as WordPress allow people to create pages and post them in an online editor without knowledge of markup, stylesheet, and programming languages. Without a dynamic website, they would have to manually create a HTML file and upload it to the web server using FTP.

• They are more complex to build and understand as they are made up of complex scripting languages.
• They are slower than static websites due to their higher server requirements. This is because they have to request data from an external resource, such as a database. All of these requests will increase the loading time and require more system resources.
• Lack of portability - A dynamic website cannot be viewed offline as it has to communicate with the web server to generate the dynamic content.

History

Between 1995 and 1996, Coldfusion, WebObjects, PHP and Active Server Pages were introduced. Then, the introduction of JavaScript enabled client-side dynamic pages to be produced with JavaScript code running in the web browser. Due to the popularity of server-side scripting, Node.js was originally developed in 2009. MediaWiki, the web server software that runs on wikis, such as Wikipedia enables dynamic pages, since anyone can edit a page at any time.