For all the (deserved) complaints people have about wordpress, it's been around since before git or markdown was even a thing. For all its faults, its been pretty resilient to time.
The real reason most websites disappear is a much more human one.
The real reason most websites disappear is a much more human one.
The more plugins you use, the faster entropy kicks in without maintenance.
With WP in general though I definitely agree.
For simple sites, especially where we don't do comments, I've started using Simply Static though to just generate pre-rendered pages. All the benefits of static site builder with all the conveniences of a CMS.
How many sites have you tested it on, have you had any issues? I'm gonna play around with it now but what I'm mostly concerned about now is how you manage the site if you point the web server to the static directory.
I made a prototype at one point where you have your actual WP site in a subdirectory, like example.com/wordpress, which is IP restricted (or behind http auth). Then you crawl that site with wget (or curl) to generate static HTML and to finish it off by search/replacing the HTML files (removing the /wordpress portion). Then you serve the static files to general users.
- WP moved to subdirectory (WP home and siteurl changed in DB)
- Static site served normally from (and generated to) webroot
Just needed to add sitemaps and robots.txt to the config to be included. Workflow is super smooth. Login to example.com/wordpress/wp-admin/, view your changes at example.com/wordpress and when you're happy, publish the site through the plugin.
Curious to see what kinds of issues I might be running into later on (this was just a quick test).
I don't base on number of plugins, I base on complexity personally.
I mostly agree with you, but in my experience most (not all) people who are capable of using a static site generator will do so. Those who aren't comfortable with it use WordPress. I'm not slamming WordPress, just making an observation.
So true.
I have had a blog running since 2006, all was php based back then with (html) posts inside a database. The tooling shouldn't be a problem, I switched systems several times (once every few years).
Currently on Hugo with markdown posts. As long as you treat your migration carefully and take some time to migrate, every tool should suffice. It's mostly about human effort and human error when things get lost.