At Talon Defense, security shapes every decision we make. When building our web presence, we chose a static site architecture powered by React Router and Vite. This approach minimizes attack surface while maximizing performance and developer productivity.
Why Static Sites Matter for Security
Traditional content management systems like WordPress have accumulated thousands of CVEs over the years. Every plugin, database query, and server-side script represents a potential vulnerability.
Static sites eliminate entire categories of attacks by removing the vectors themselves. There's no database to inject, no server-side code to exploit, no authentication layer to bypass. What gets deployed is pure HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Fewer moving parts means fewer things that can break or be exploited.
The React Router Advantage
We selected React Router v7 in framework mode with static site generation for several reasons.
Our team works with React daily. Components, hooks, and TypeScript power our website using the same tools we use for application development. There's no context-switching to unfamiliar templating languages.
At build time, React Router generates static HTML for every route. Visitors receive fully-rendered pages instantly, with React hydrating in the background for interactivity. Framework mode also generates TypeScript types for route parameters automatically, catching errors at compile time rather than runtime.
CI/CD Integration and Quality Control
Our deployment pipeline enforces quality at every stage. Automated processes validate builds, run linting, and verify that all routes prerender successfully. Pull requests require review before merging, and every deployment creates an immutable snapshot we can roll back to instantly.
The static output deploys to Cloudflare Pages, adding DDoS protection and automatic HTTPS. No origin server to protect means no origin server to compromise.
Encouraging Developer Participation
Engineers create blog posts as Markdown files in the same repository they already work in. Git handles versioning. The tools are familiar because they're the same tools used for everything else.
When writing a post requires nothing more than creating a file and opening a pull request, participation increases and technical accuracy improves. This architecture reflects how we think about building secure systems.