A Hands-On Guide to Silex: Building Static Sites Visually

This guide will show you how to use Silex's visual editor to go from a blank canvas to a ready-to-publish static site, all built on clean HTML and CSS standards.

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The modern web requires sites that are fast, flexible, and completely under your control. While many popular platforms offer easy drag-and-drop editors, they come with a high price — constant subscription fees and proprietary code that traps you in their ecosystem. For anyone committed to open source, this loss of control is unacceptable. Developers, designers, and business owners deserve visual tools that truly respect their freedom and data ownership, allowing them to create without the fear of vendor lock-in.

This is where Silex comes in — a powerful, 100% free, and AGPL-licensed visual website builder. Silex lets you design, build, and export professional static websites without ever using proprietary software. If you prioritise freedom, performance, and control, Silex is the open source solution you need to master.

Accessing and starting Silex

The only prerequisite to access Silex is to have a GitLab account. To begin experimenting instantly, simply open the official instance https://v3.silex.me/ in your web browser; you will get a page to sign in using Gitlab.com.

While you can build without an account, saving and managing projects remotely requires connecting a service. Silex uses GitLab for this integration due to its open source nature. To enable saving, you first need an active account on GitLab.com. Click on the Sign In/Sign Up button within the Silex interface, go to Authorize with Gitlab, and then approve the request from the Silex Labs Foundation. Once authorised, you can save your projects directly to your GitLab repositories, ensuring true version control and data ownership. Then the page shown in Figure 1 will appear.

Now scroll down, click on the Create Website button and provide a name for your site. Let us name it