When I spend over an hour looking for a solution, it’s time to make a blog post, so no one else has to spend all that time again. With WordPress powering 43% of websites on the web, and growing, and internet speed increasing, affordable web hosting servers often aren’t delivering content as fast as users would like or as fast as Google would want. WordPress plugins that optimize and do caching can help; compression and CDNs (content distribution networks) help too. But, the very fastest way to deliver content is plain old HTML, with as little stack or layers overhead as possible.
Here are the plugins and services that make WordPress super fast by converting the site’s content into static HTML, the ones I found so far. And, once converted into HTML, the files could be hosted on a simple web hosting server, AWS, GitHub Pages, Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, and BunnyCDN, or whatever.
WordPress to HTML Converter Plugins & Services
Recorp’s Export WP page to static HTML/CSS https://myrecorp.com/export-wp-pages-to-static-html-css-pro/ – “a static html site or page generator thats help you to convert your wordpress site or pages to static html website and you can host it on your server, from a static html hosting provider or from a cdn. Pricing is $39.99/yr for 1 domain, $69.99/yr for 3 domains, $199/yr for unlimited domains.
HardyPress https://www.hardypress.com – “The principle behind HardyPress is simple: visitors access a completely static version of your website. Your real WordPress installation lives on a separate domain and only runs when an editor needs to make some changes to the content.” Pricing is €5/mo for 1 site, €25/mo for unlimited sites with 3GB, €80/mo for unlimited sites with 30GB.
FLATsite https://flatsite.com – “Create or convert to a WordPress static site easy on FLATsite. Go static for unhackable, fast and scalable sites.” Pricing is $64.95/mo for unlimited sites with 64GB storage.
Simply Static https://patrickposner.dev/plugins/simply-static/ – “Convert your WordPress site into a static one with the WordPress static site generator plugin.” Pricing is $99.99 for 1 domain annually, $179.99 for 3 domains annually, $499.99 for unlimited domains and no annual fees.
Staatic https://staatic.com – “Staatic is a platform to create an extremely fast and highly secure static version of your WordPress site without effort.” Pricing is €9/mo for 1 domain, €29/mo for 3 domains.
Strattic https://www.strattic.com – “Static and Headless WordPress. In one click. Static WordPress has never been easier: host your WordPress site on Strattic and get a fast, secure and scalable static site.” Pricing starts at $199/mo.
WP2Static https://wp2static.com – “Generate static WordPress sites with the WP2Static by Strattic open source plugin.”
StaticPress2019 plugin is open source software maintained by volunteers – “transforms your WordPress into static websites and blogs.” cf. example use.
Oh, just in case you’re looking for something to convert the other way around, to upload a static HTML page into a WordPress site, there’s the Static Pages plugin for that.
A Pause for a Thought
I could see how this could become a more competitive landscape as more savvy coders make this an easier process to get super fast websites, perhaps even one-click integrated with popular web hosting services. As it is now, there are some technical details for each of these plugins and services that you’d need to prepared to work with in making a conversion. I’d love to hear how it goes for you if you do. I’m not ready to, yet.
Photo by Tran Mau Tri Tam ✪ on Unsplash