Static Website vs. WordPress
Hey there,
recently I have switched from WordPress to a Static Site Generator (Gatsby) for my LP.
Over the years WP became so annoying when it comes to customizing stuff. Even with an good customizable theme it got frustrating quickly.
I am curious what do you think about static websites, is it worth it to go static and why? Or do you think it’s better and easier to go with WordPress?
I wrote about static websites benefits here https://ottofeller.com/blog/a-static-website-simplicity-performance-and-SEO-that-fits-any-project I think it's not fair to compare Gatsby and WordPress. Both have their strength.
But for a simple website, even with some minor functionality no doubt you would like to go with Gatsby instead of WP.
Yeah a lot of long time wordpress users are swapping to static site generators.
I built https://saaspages.xyz/ with Gatsby, but I struggled with it to be honest.
I'm also building a no code tool https://versoly.com/ for SaaS landing pages/marketing sites with the goal to replace Wordpress :)
The sites are static and can be exported easily. All the code is very readable and mostly use Bootstrap classes.
The sites score 99-100/100 on speed tests.
I know there are also WP plugins that convert your site to static or you can use WP as a headless CMS.
A lot of options now.
Awesome idea with https://saaspages.xyz/ btw, Volkan! :) I've just subscribed to to the mailing list.
Yeah there are really a many options out there, as a dev I really try to use the state-of-the-art architecture on the one hand, but I also don't want to spent so much time building a simple webiste or landingpage. But, as pagespeed becomes more important, I think it's a good idea to move from WP to static.
Btw I tested some WP-Plugins to "convert" the site to static, did not really work for me.
Thanks for your contribution.
Thanks for subbing :)
Interesting, good to know that they don't really work.
I spent over 150 hours + $300 on themes and extensions to build a WP site. I switched to Kirby and it took me $99 + 30 hours to finish the site. If you know to code, you should look elsewhere.
I think it completely comes down to the use case. The WordPress themes and plugins ecosystem, along with a decently friendly CMS experience drew a lot of people into using WP. Many now just accept it as the default solution, not knowing that their basic landing page website could be statically generated. Static is great if you know what you're doing.
I think static site generators are powerful. But I'm biased because I created this open source library https://github.com/hashobject/perun and my own site is just s static site https://podviaznikov.com/ generated by Hugo and custom tool I'm building.
we use wordpress at work for the landing page and for a shop and it's a huge pain in the ass.
I wouldn't recommend it at all, especially not for something as trivial as a landing page, why bring in a backend and a database for static content?
For my blog I use hugo as a static site generator. The speed is mindblowing and I'm love golang so it's a natural fit.
Wordpress might have been nice for people with no tech background a couple years back, but I'm sure there are plenty of no code alternatives by now.
It depends on what tool you pick for building them. At https://www.bankpayments.net we started off with wordpress and the learning curve was pretty high even for us techies. We switched to WebFlow and haven't looked back since. As I mentioned on several of my posts, I think WebFlow is an excellent "no-code" tool for building websites.
I used jekyll to build my blog and I honestly think that if you know how to code a bit, using a static generator is better. You have more control over your website and it costs less.
Love my early work with gatsby, especially since I am not an I.T. person but a person trying to use I.T. well. Gatsby starts off easy and there are a ton of dedicated community members but boy does it get hard fast. To really be productive, you have to know some node.js, some graphql, maybe some react, markdown, css, etc. But I am sticking with it. I moved from a basic understanding of hugo since there was some random bug which wouldn't allow my sites to render locally (Ubuntu 18.04/19.04). The community there basically shrugged their shoulders. Currently building images locally then pushing them to dokku. It's pretty great for a non-fullstack person. And super fast here in China where most everything useful is banned.