Google Firebase Static Site Hosting

Static Website Hosting on Google Firebase.

01

Speed and SEO

Static sites are faster and speed is a known Google metric particularly on mobile. YouDoCMS static sites on Google Firebase achieve a 100% Lighthouse score.

02

Secure

Static sites are secure and are not targeted which in turn reduces wasteful traffic and bandwidth. Its a win for you and the environment.

03

Cost Effective

Reduce your costs with YouDoCMS and the Firebase Spark plan which is always free with limits for storage, hosting, SSL certificate, CDN and a custom domain.

Firebase Spark Hosting

Firebase is more than just hosting.

Firebase is an integrated platform incorporating a database, Firestore cloud storage, serverless functions and static website hosting. YouDoCMS headless CMS integrates with firebase for static site hosting and cloud storage.

Firebase Hosting supports multiple sites. You can associate multiple sites with one Firebase project. Each site hosts its own unique static assets, but shares Firebase resources with the other sites in the same Firebase project.

Firebase is an excellent choice for small business static sites due to the generous limits of the Spark free plan which includes 10Gb of storage, no maximum file size and data transfer limit of 360 MB/day.

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Google Firebase Hosting

Google Firebase offer the Spark plan for static website hosting with generous limits that make this a good choice for small businesses or sites with large files.

Firebase supports multiple sites within a project. For example if you have video content to be shared between two websites. The video content can be uploaded to Firestore cloud storage and shared between both sites.

  • Free Tier 10Gb Storage.
  • Firebase multiple sites per project.
  • Google Analytics Integration.
  • Custom domain and SSL Certificate.
Firebase Setup
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Firebase Storage

Firebase static site hosting provides an integrated repository including storage and is the simplest way to serve your static site via Google CDN.

Firebase utilises blob storage and each deployment is a single object. Firebase retains a history of each deployment making it very simple to rollback to a previous deploy in the event of an error.

The Firebase  console is easy to understand however Firebase does not include a file explorer like AWS or Azure. This can be confusing at first however integration with YouDoCMS local build folder and the rollback functionality make deployment simple.

  • Firebase redirects.
  • Firebase object storage with rollback.
  • Single click deploy of single page or whole site.
  • Local domain for testing.
Firebase Hosting
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Firebase CDN

The Firebase API uses Node.js and NPM. YouDoCMS includes a single click install of Firebase javascript sdk. Initialise a new Firebase project with provision of SSL and storage in a single step.

After your site has been built using the YouDoCMS  static site generator a single click deploy to Firebase invoked the Firebase CLI to synchronise your local build folder with Firebase blob storage. Before deployment we check the base URL matches the Firebase domain and generate a robots.txt and sitemap to enable/disable indexing by search engines. Synchronisation includes removing outdated files and uploading new content.

  • Single click deploy Firebase blob storage.
  • Firebase endpoint cache refresh.
  • Base URL check.
  • Robots.txt and Meta Noindex.
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Firebase Static Website Performance

GTMetrix test results for our home page tested on 19/12/2022 show Firebase achieving an excellent Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) time of 468ms which compares very favourably with the AWS (460ms), Cloudflare (393ms) and Azure (495ms). 

LCP measures how long it takes for the largest content element e.g. an image or heading text on your page to become visible. For a good user experience, aim for an LCP of 1.2 seconds or less.

The 2022 Web Almanac analysis of the performance of hosted content management systems shows that less than half of the tested CMS sites achieve a “good” LCP of under 2.5 seconds for desktop or mobile.

  • 100% Lighthouse Score.
  • Fastest CDN LCP score.
  • Fast fully loaded time of 468ms.
  • Time to first byte of 42ms.
Why Speed Matters