Here is a test I run on every site a prospective client sends me, before I look at anything else. Open the site in Chrome, open the developer tools, find the setting that disables JavaScript, and reload.
Some sites come back exactly as they were, minus a few animations. Some come back as a blank page with a spinner. A surprising number come back as a header, a footer, and nothing in between.
If yours is in the last two groups, you have a problem that no amount of keyword work will fix.
Why it matters
A search crawler and an AI assistant are not a person with a browser. They fetch the raw HTML of your page, and what is in that file is what they have. Google does run JavaScript eventually, in a second pass that can lag the first by days and is skipped altogether when its budget runs out. The AI crawlers, as far as anyone outside those companies can tell, mostly do not run it at all.
So a site that paints its words with JavaScript after loading is handing the crawler an empty envelope. Your service pages, your prices, your reviews, the paragraph that explains what makes you different: none of it reaches the thing deciding whether to recommend you.
Page builders are the usual cause. The platform loads a shell, then fetches your content and draws it. It looks fine to you, because you are a person with a browser. It is invisible to the machine you are trying to be found by.
How I build instead
Every site I build is static-first. That means the HTML file for each page is generated at build time with every word already in it. The browser gets a complete page, then adds behaviour on top: the menu that opens, the form that validates, the image that fades in. Take the JavaScript away and the page is still a page.
Three things follow from that, and they matter more than they sound.
It is fast by construction. There is no waiting for a script to fetch the content, because the content is the page. Pages load in a fraction of a second on an ordinary phone connection. Core Web Vitals, the speed measures Google reports, come out green at handover without a performance project afterwards.
It is readable by every machine the same way. Google, Bing, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini all get the same HTML, with the same words in the same order. There is no separate "SEO version" to keep in sync, because there is only one version.
It fails safely. A script that errors, a third-party widget that goes down, an old phone that chokes on something modern: the page still reads. The worst case is a site without the polish, not a site without the content.
Try it on your own site
You do not need me for this.
- Open your homepage in Chrome.
- Press F12, or right-click and choose Inspect, to open the developer tools.
- Press Ctrl+Shift+P (Cmd+Shift+P on a Mac), type "javascript", and choose "Disable JavaScript".
- Reload the page.
If the words are still there, your site passes. If they are not, the next question is what the site is built on, and the honest answer is often that it needs rebuilding rather than fixing. I will tell you which, and if it is the cheaper one, I will say so.
Paul Redman runs Redman Studio, an independent web design and engineering studio in Watford, Hertfordshire. Every site it ships is static-first, with the proof annotated on this site.