A program running on the web server (server-side scripting) is used to change the web content on various web pages, or to adjust the sequence of or reload of the web pages. Server responses may be determined by such conditions as data in a posted HTML form, parameters in the URL, the type of browser being used, the passage of time, or a database or server state.

Such web pages are often created with the help of server-side languages such as ASP, ColdFusion, Perl, PHP, and other languages. These server-side languages often use the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) to produce dynamic web pages. Two notable exceptions are ASP.NET and JSP, which reuse CGI concepts in their APIs but actually dispatch all web requests into a shared virtual machine.

Server-side dynamic pages can also use the first kind of dynamic content on the client side.

While VM-based server-side languages and CGI would be preferred for new development, some web-servers also support Server Side Includes (typically for a file extension such as .shtml), and Jhtml was a Java server-side technology developed before JSP.