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Comment by holoduke | Hacker News Reader

Because it's slow. Even the fastest wordpress static site plugin still requires the huge wordpress site to initialize. I have never seen a fast wordpress site. I mean sub 50ms loading times. With a plain nginx route to index.html containing some fixed CSS,js files is so much faster.

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I think you're misunderstanding what Wordpress's static site generator plugin does. It bakes the WP content in to static HTML files that the server (eg nginx) then serves to the user. Website visitors never hit any part of WP. It's only there for the admin and editor. You can serve the static files from a different server infrastructure (say, an S3 bucket) with a little work.

In other words, it does precisely what you're saying it should do.

So sounds like you now have to maintain a static site and a wordpress site - is this any easier than just using a static site generator directly?

You only have to maintain the Wordpress site unless you do fancy stuff on top of it. And on modern Wordpress that's quite minimal. The point of this approach is that people with Wordpress expertise can continue to manage the website and you get all the benefits of a static website.

My Wordpress sites have minimal plugins (hence minimal JS and CSS) and run via a VPS and using Litespeed Enterprise, and they're almost as fast as static sites - but with 100x the ease of use and power.

Heck, my Wordpress blogs are faster than when I had static sites on shared hosting.

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