Way back in the prior millennium I got my start developing websites using FrontPage. FrontPage was much maligned by web elitists, but it worked great for me. Its intuitive WYSIWYG editor is still my favorite of all that I’ve used. I clung to my flat HTML site for years after FrontPage was discontinued, struggling to update it using whatever free tool Microsoft offered at the time. Finally in 2015 this approach – using crappy tools to maintain an antiquated site – became so obviously untenable that I was forced to find another solution. I found WordPress, fell in love with it, and never looked back.
But WP, like other CMS, has a couple of obvious drawbacks. It allows for – and seems to encourage – development and testing in the production environment. And it has the Admin login that bad bots love to pound at. It provides a much larger, more target-rich profile for hackers. There are viable free solutions to protect the Admin login. But for separating dev/test from production – most solutions seem a bit complex and/or expensive to suit me.
I decided to try out the WP2Static plugin. It purports to convert a WP site to static html. If it works as advertised, I could choose to use WP strictly for development, and to publish flat HTML – just as I did way back when with FrontPage.
And … after a frustrating false start almost certainly caused by something dunderheaded on my part – it worked surprisingly well – with just a couple of exceptions. I was expecting a struggle but it was easy-breezy. Dynamic PHP-dependent stuff breaks. I don’t allow comments on the site but if I did I would have to incorporate Disqus or something similar. Forms like my Contact page don’t work, but I wasn’t expecting it to and I can fix it. My Adsense ads disappeared, which I could probably figure out and fix but probably won’t bother since I make approximately $0 from the site.
I view this as a special-purpose solution, really useful in certain cases but not for most WP sites. I would probably use it on a site that I no longer want to update but want to keep live and limit maintenance as much as practical.
