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Comment by rexreed | Hacker News Reader

Can someone please provide practical advice on moving from a site hosted on Wordpress using all the plugins to a static hosted site? It seems unbelievably complicated.

My non-technical employees and partners like Wordpress. We like the plugins that make web development easy and not arcane.

But we don't like the fact that every page requires basically a database read. Yes, we use WP-SuperCache, and it's ok.

But why oh why is it so hard to do the editing on Wordpress and the publishing on a Static site? Anyone with some real guidance here?

We want the people who come to the site to get the static experience while the people who edit the site to get the Wordpress experience.

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1 - Use a CDN and cache your html on the edge. 5 mins of work for infinite read scaling and no other changes.

2 - You can run a process to crawl your WP site and output all the pages as static files, then upload those for hosting. WP2Static handles that for you: https://wordpress.org/plugins/static-html-output-plugin/

3 - Use Wordpress as a "headless" CMS for editing and storing content, then use one of the modern static site frameworks to get content over JSON/HTTP from Wordpress while building your site.

I'd go for option 1 and call it done.

> My non-technical employees and partners like Wordpress. We like the plugins that make web development easy and not arcane.

Use what works for your teams. Apparently, that's Wordpress and that's okay.

> We want the people who come to the site to get the static experience while the people who edit the site to get the Wordpress experience.

Stick a caching proxy or CDN in front of it, not just a Wordpress cache plugin. Something like CloudFlare would help you out.

Static site generation is just a trendy reinvention of caching. Put a CDN in front of your site, or run one of the many wordpress cache plugins [1] and point your httpd at the cache directory instead of PHP.

[1] https://wordpress.org/plugins/static-html-output-plugin/

> Can someone please provide practical advice on moving from a site hosted on Wordpress using all the plugins to a static hosted site? It seems unbelievably complicated.

Oh I'm sure it is. Static website is just that--static. You don't have a database, and that is a great thing, but that also means you can't store stuff like users, comments, articles to be published in the future, etc. out of the box.

You can do all of that of course, but it's going to be difficult, and you're gonna plug non-static parts to your static website (such as plugging the comments part). All in all, you can't expect to have all the advantages of static websites as well as Wordpress.

I personally simply took my content from Wordpress and built a new website with gatsbyjs. It's fast, clean, and entirely in React + Typescript. It has no dynamic parts, though. If you're a business and your Wordpress site is production critical, who knows, you might not want to migrate. You might also want to explore alternative solutions, like split some parts of your Wordpress blob into several static websites, and keep the main WP site with less content that's easier to manage... There are a number of possibilities.

You can use wget or curl to make a static copy of your Wordpress site and publish that. There are some small caveats (all files need to be reachable via links or you will have to manually tell wget where to find them) but it's a great solution if you want the convenience of Wordpress and the security of a static website.

I set up such a system for my old research group during my PhD (as they were not allowed to use Wordpress directly) and they are still using it 8 years later: http://iramis.cea.fr/spec/Pres/Quantro/static/index.html

Back then I wrote a simple Wordpress plugin that would create an empty file when a button was pressed in the UI, and I had a cron job that was executed once per minute, checked if the file existed and if so deleted it and copied the new version of the dynamic website to the static server.

In a previous life I worked on a site that had a private Wordpress instance that was scraped and cloned to a more or less static site.

You can either do this explicitly using a small scraper tool, or implicitly using aggressive reverse-proxy caching rules.

Sounds pretty intensive. Every page would need constant scraping as links update and sidebars change, wouldn't they?

I think you might be overthinking it. Just drop cache after publishing.

Maybe you’re doing something more complicated that isn’t amenable to pseudo-static?

Just put cloudflare or a similar service in front of it and tada, your host handles only a few requests per minute.

Is there any quick guide or plugin for front-ending Wordpress with Cloudflare? Sorry if this is a LMGTFY or RTFM but there's legit lots of conflicting advice.

You should set this up from within cloudflare. What they do is essentially download your website from a private url, e.g. blog.mydomain.com and publish it under your public domain, e.g. myblog.com.

In theory, wordpress doesn’t even know it’s happening. Make sure to disable any caching plugins as well, you won’t need them anymore.

Hardypress.com is an easy option.

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