Dynamic content
What is dynamic content?
Dynamic content is assembled at the moment of the request instead of being written once and stored: stock levels, prices, recommended products, search results, or text that differs for a signed-in visitor. It keeps a page accurate, and it costs speed — a dynamic page has to be cached sensibly or every visit becomes work for the database.
What it is used for
- Current data: prices, stock levels, delivery dates, the number of places left on a course.
- Lists that change: new products, search results, filters, related articles.
- Personal content: a greeting for a signed-in customer, their order history, prices for a B2B client, recommendations based on what they viewed.
- Content that depends on place or language: the nearest shop, the currency, the delivery cost.
The opposite is static content: a page written once and served the same way to everyone, like most of an “About us” page.
Example
An online electronics shop shows on each product page the price, the stock in its three warehouses and the expected delivery date. All of it is worked out on every visit with several database queries, and the server takes 1.9 seconds before it sends the first byte of the page (time to first byte). On sale days it slows down further, just when traffic peaks.
The developers split the page. The description, photos and specifications, which rarely change, are kept ready in a cache and served at once; price and stock are fetched as a small separate piece and refreshed every minute. The page now starts in 0.3 seconds, the same server carries four times the traffic on sale days, and prices stay accurate.
Why it matters for a business
Dynamic content keeps a site accurate and personal without anyone retyping it: the price on the page is the price in the system, and a returning customer sees what is relevant to them. It has two costs. Every dynamic part is work for the server on each visit, so it has to be cached sensibly or it slows the site down. And search engines index what the server sends them: content that appears only after scripts run, or only for signed-in visitors, may not be indexed at all.
So it is planned in the design, not added later: which parts of each page change, what they depend on, how often they refresh and which version Google sees.
What to ask
- Which parts of our pages really need to be worked out on every visit, and which could be kept ready?
- How fast does the server answer on our busiest day, not on an ordinary one?
- Do prices and stock on the site come from the same system as the warehouse and the accounting?
- Does Google see the same main content as a visitor, prices and product text included?
Dynamic content is planned in the design: which parts change, what they depend on and which version Google sees. How we do it is described in our website development and on the page about the T&B platform.