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Comment by keehun | Hacker News Reader

Is there a plug-in or another software that does this? I’ve been looking for ways to statically “archive” a Wordpress site so I can host it on GitHub Pages but still have the editing/theme/plug-in support. I don’t care about the search functionality.

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Simply Static

https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/

Has anyone actually done this? I looked into it briefly, came away thinking it was going to be non-trivial to get working (or might have downstream bugs), and gave it up as not worth it.

But I could have been completely wrong. Anyone have real world experience?

(BTW - My site is small and 99% of users are not logged in, and 99% of pages are unchanging, so a perfect use case for a static site.)

Yep. Did it this weekend. Moved main blog over to a different subdomain, added basic auth to stop it being crawled, added Simply Static, pressed button and a few minutes later the main site was updated.

Some perf tweaks I made were to point the main site’s wp-content/uploads at the WP htdocs via a nginx path mapping, and to tell SS to never export anything in uploads. Reduces the site generation to just the html, css, and JS.

The only issue I've found so far is that archive URLs like /YYYY/MM/, which would be handled by Wordpress to list all posts in that month, don't get exported by Simply Static. I suspect it's because they're all available by a select dropdown that's using a JS hook for onChange(). I solved this by creating an unlinked page, and put in an Archives block, then told Simply Static to add that unlinked page to the crawl list.

The other caution is that it doesn't export anything that's not linked. So if you've got no links to the yearly archives, then you get no index.html files for /YYYY/ either. Unfortunately, the Archives block in Wordpress doesn't offer a toggle between months and years, so you can't just create another block in the "archive finder" page and set it to years.

The support forum section of wordpress.org for the plugin appears to be a lot of people asking for support and no comments by the plugin author. If it works for you, then that's probably not an issue.

Yep, it wasn't too hard to get it working. I modified my theme slightly to get rid of the search bar that doesn't work, and I hid comments, since those won't work either.

My homepage running on vanilla Wordpress: https://www.skyfaller.space/

The same site using Simply Static: https://static.skyfaller.space/

Does it feel slightly faster?

You can feed both URLs to Google's Page Speed tool. The dynamic page scores 75/96 (mobile/desktop), and the static scores 72/98. So perhaps for your specific case it's not much of an improvement (I'd consider the 3 point drop for static mobile to be within margin of error).

[0] https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skyfa...

[1] https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.sk...

Actually for me the Wordpress version loaded faster! But I guess pagespeed is the right way to check.

Problem with these plugins is that if you have a large database with posts/pages, it could run into memory/CPU issues while trying to generate the static files and can intermittently fail unless you are on a beefy server.

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