A few years ago, my wife asked me if I would help her set up a blog. I told her, just use WordPress. This has been and will continue to be my advice. I firmly believe WordPress is the easiest way to get your content out on the internet.
When it was time to renew her WordPress.com hosting, she realized she hadn't posted in a while. So she asked, can I put her blog somewhere else.
I know there are cheaper WordPress hosting options. But I took this as an opportunity to demonstrate my developer skills. After all, how often do you get the chance with family and friends.
Of course, I didn't want to host a WordPress blog mysql. As awesome as WordPress is, it's a malware magnet. I also didn't want the headache of maintaining WordPress. Especially since she wasn't really using WordPress anymore.
What she really wanted was to not pay for hosting anymore, but keep her blog live. She wasn't changing anything or writing content. She didn't need WordPress anymore. She just needed to archive her blog.
So, I crawled her blog and downloaded all the pages and assets. I threw this bundle into a GitHub repo and connected it to Cloudflare Pages. The blog was still live. Just no more WordPress. No more hosting (Cloudflare free tier).
I figured if she wanted to write another blog post she could just send me a Google doc and I would convert it to HTML myself. Given she hadn't written anything in a while, I figured this was a low risk.
Not all sites need WordPress
This whole thing got me thinking two things.
First, my wife is probably not the only person with this need. WordPress touts itself as powering millions of websites. Recent stats say up to 43% of all websites are powered by WordPress (roughly 460 million). If just 1% of those websites were unused, that's 4.6 million websites. And if just 1% of those wanted to archive their WordPress site, that's 46,000 potential customers. That's a market.
Second, I've actually done this before. I've been a PHP developer for 25 years. During that time I did my tour as a WordPress developer. One of the web agencies I worked for had a client who was restricted from using PHP in production. In fairness, it wasn't just PHP. They couldn't use any server side technology. The site had to be static - just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (no XHR).
As a WordPress shop, we used WordPress. WordPress was our hammer, and despite the client's needs, their site was another nail. So, we used WordPress. At least privately in a staging environment. This way, the client could make changes to the site. Once they were approved, they bundled (archived) the site into its static assets (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, etc). They'd send this along to their third-party hosting provider.
Everyone was happy. We got to use the tool that we knew and loved. They were able to quickly make changes to their site. All while still satisfying the security requirements of their host.
Such a use case opens up even more possibilities. Now it's not just WordPress sites to archive. But potentially sites that may still use WordPress, but maybe don't want to in production. For whatever reason (security, performance, etc).
When I worked at the New York Times, they did something very similar. Many of their blogs were built with a modified version of WordPress. Given the traffic to those sites, the production sites didn't run WordPress. They were mostly static copies, published from an internal environment.
A service to bundle WordPress sites
These two thoughts put this at the top of the side-project ideas list. I had been pairing with JT on another idea. We discussed this one right around the time of the "WP Drama". Between that potential exodus from WordPress and the use cases above, we decided to turn the idea into a service.
That's the genesis of WP Static - a service which bundles your WordPress site into a static copy. In the spirit of DIY, it's free to bundle a WordPress site. You may take that and host it wherever you prefer. If (like my wife) you just want it done. WP Static has a one-time, flat rate guided WordPress migration to bundle your site, as well as convert an email contact form, then store it on GitHub and deploy it. If (like the restricted client) you are interested in continuously deploying a static copy of your WordPress site, get on the waitlist for our upcoming service.
If you want to keep your WordPress site, but no longer need or want WordPress, WP Static makes the migration quick any easy.