Server-Side Includes: How They Thrived and Died

Server-side includes (SSI) used to be a major plus point in hosting.

Back when HTML was king, SSI added a dynamic element to website development.

But SSI has now largely been left behind.

Is it worth revisiting?

The Basics of SSI

SSI is designed to support large, complex websites.

It helped to prevent unnecessary duplication of code, meaning fewer changes across the site. It’s effectively a rudimentary template system using little else but raw HTML.

Using SSI, users could call the code from a flat file into the page, using a function similar to

<!--#include virtual="../navigation.txt" -->

The Cons of SSI

The big problem with SSI is that it’s slow.

Pages with SSIs also had to be named .shtm or .shtml, and some people felt this harmed Google rankings.

SSI was therefore overtaken by modern coding techniques, and there are few reasons anyone would use them now.

The Replacement for SSI

Most developers have turned to server-side content management systems (CMS) built in either PHP or PERL. There’s no need for SSI when you’re using a CMS.

Within a few years, SSI went from being innovative to effectively abandoned.

It’ still interesting to note just how far development has come in the pursuit of an easy way to manage big, complex websites. But as a coding technique, SSI really has had its day.