What you should know about using WordPress
WordPress is used by many people and is generally easy to use, however we hear complaints about WordPress from clients everyday.
Some of the issues with WordPress:
Vulnerability:
Most WordPress users don't realize just how vulnerable WordPress actually is. Every day of the week there are hackers trying to get access to your website. Yes, every day! If they do get access to your website you might wake up one morning to find that your website has been replaced with another one or used to distribute malicious code to unsuspecting visitors, which could do significant damage to your brand and customer's trust.
Performance:
The speed of your website is incredibly important: it is one of the factors that Google considers when ranking your site but, more significantly, if your website is slow your visitors won't come back.
This problem is now worse than ever before, because of the number of people browsing your website on a mobile device.
Updates and plug-ins:
When logged in as WordPress admin, you will constantly be reminded to update your plug-ins, your framework, your theme and WordPress itself. Most people proceed with the installation without a thought, then oops, your header image is broken, your website is blank, or your website looks different than you expected, requiring extra work.
Maybe it is due to the “duct tape,” DIY nature of PHP coding but the WordPress plug-ins repository is a labyrinth of discontinued versions and half-patched improvements.
Then, you have to go through the hassle of trying to figure out which add-ons are either incompatible with your theme, or incompatible with other plug-ins.
Finally, even if you manage to fill all of the holes in the functionality that you are after, eventually you realize that the more plug-ins you add, the more you site is going to slow to a disgusting crawl.
The Solution:
Why use WordPress or any other CMS for that matter? If you can grasp MarkDown (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown), which is very easy to learn, you can by pass all of the issues related to WordPress, like performance, security, updates, poorly written plug-ins or hosting expense and have complete control of your website's layout by using one of the many free static site generators like Jekyll, Hugo or Middleman. Writing in MarkDown can be hugely productive for writers or anyone who would like to create content and have the best performance possible.
We have many WordPress sites of our own that we have converted to static sites. Just tired of dealing with the lack of performance, constant updates, having to work around WordPress's platform and people trying to hack into the sites.
We are programmers and have on many occasions rewritten WordPress to work the way we would like, it is just, I think, counter-productive to have a web application generate what should be static content.
Many programmers and others are switching to static based sites for the reasons mentioned among others. There is even a WordPress plug-in for exporting your content into Jekyll's format. There are many free high quality templates that can be used for static sites and modifying them is easy.
https://jekyllthemes.org/ are a few of the many free themes. Actually, just about any theme, WordPress or other can easily be made into a static site template.
A static site can be zipped up and hosted anywhere, no database connection or PHP necessary. Also you can work on your site locally without even being connected to the Internet and upload you pages when you are ready.
Please contact us to get help started with your own static site.
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