Serve static html with pure static Wordpress plugin

Written by
Date: 2012-06-01 21:41:00 00:00


I'm obsessed with site performance and I'm usually experimenting different ways to achieve the best possible performance.

This blog is by now powered by Jekyll, a ruby based static site generator.

If you want the same thing without the hassle of working with Jekyll, and feel better working with Wordpress, you can still do it.

I'm not talking about WP-Super-Cache or W3-Total-Cache plugins, I'm talking about an old plugin named really static. It is not under heavy development, but it works as it should.

What this plugin does is very simple, it exports static html from out of your Wordpress site. The output can be uploaded via SFTP or FTP directly from the plugin, or saved in a local folder.

You can run your copy of Wordpress locally in your laptop, edit your site, add posts, change templates, etc. As soon as you feel comfortable with it you can export the html.

Serving pure static html files has two main advantages for me:

  • Speed: Any web server, will serve html files a lot faster than PHP generated files.
  • Security: If you are serving just static files, there is not way to hack your site.

Another advantage is that you can server your site from S3 buckets directly.

Installing this plugin and making it work is really easy, just be sure to adjust where your files are going to be saved, and which is the full FQDN and path to use as your "base path".

The Internet should be fast, and mostly static, do not create dynamic sites, unless you really, really need it.