Description
Simply Static is a static site generator that converts your existing WordPress website to a static website that you can host on your server, a static hosting provider, or a CDN.
It drastically improves the performance of your website and minimizes security risks as it removes the connection between your traditional server and your static website.
Simply Static can also be used by local development tools like LocalWP or Lando to develop your website offline and push the static site online.
This reduces your hosting costs to zero (depending on your requirements and the used service/provider).
Performance
Converting your website to a static website can drastically improve your performance. Simply Static eliminates all requests to your database and by that reducing the first time to byte.
This is especially impactful for websites that use long pages with a lot of animations, graphs, and other load-heavy tools like sliders.
Security
Removing the connection to your database and traditional server reduces the risk of getting hacked.
This reduces the stress to keep your WordPress website up to date and keeps your data secure (locally or in a protected environment).
Reduce hosting costs
Using Simply Static to deploy your website to one of the static hosting providers, a CDN or an S3 bucket reduces the amount of money required for reliable web hosting.
With the right setup, you can even host your website completely for free (Cloudflare Pages and GitHub Pages for example).
Local development
Develop your site locally and only push the static exported website on a server. To ensure everything works as expected I created a list of development tools that are completely supported:
I highly recommend not to use another tool for local development if you are not a programmer as in most cases manual package installation is required.
Simply Static Pro
The pro version of Simply Static enhances the plugin with various features.
GitHub Integration
With the GitHub integration, you can completely automate your entire development process.
The only thing you need is a GitHub account, no knowledge of Git or GitHub itself is required, as Simply Static Pro handles the entire process for you and keeps your repository up to date.
This allows deploying your static website to:
- GitHub Pages
- Cloudflare Pages
- Netlify
- Vercel
- SFTP to your server
AWS S3 Integration & Digital Ocean Spaces Integration
Export directly to Amazon AWS S3 from Simply Static Pro. Connect your bucket and run your export.
BunnyCDN Integration
Export directly to BunnyCDN and get all the benefits of their CDN – including caching, file optimization and DNS management.
Builds and Single Exports
Create builds to export only a subset of pages/posts. You can assign a build to every custom post type in your WordPress admin area and export them.
Never sit back and watch a full static export running, instead run a complete export once and then use builds to export the changes as fast as possible.
You can also export single pages/posts after changed something.
Forms
Simply Static Pro supports Contact Form 7 and Gravity Forms to use on your static website.
You can decide if you want to use an external service like Zapier and IFTTT or if your original WordPress website should handle the submission and send you an e-mail with all the details.
Search
Use a fully static search solution that does not rely on any Third-Party-Providers. It uses Fuse.js and creates an index of your whole website as a JSON file.
The search supports autosuggestion and fuzzy logic and is by default way more convenient than your default WordPress search.
Comments
Enable comments on your static website without the requirement of Third-Party-Providers. Use your original WordPress website to process the comment.
After a comment was submitted, Simply Static automatically exports a new static version of the post. You don’t have to do anything.
Multilingual
Use WPML, Polylang or TranslatePress and run static exports per language or all at once.
Simply Static Pro also supports configuring settings per language, using the available language switchers and more to export a your multilingual website as easy as possible.
WP-CLI
Simply Static Pro has a detailed and comprehensive integration with WP-CLI.
Control every option, run different kinds of exports and more with the WP-CLI integration.
Minification
Automatically minfiy HTML, CSS and JavaScript files on your static site.
We can even minify inline CSS & JavaScript.
Optimization
Replace default WordPress paths and completely hide that you are using WordPress behind the scenes.
Replace:
- wp-content
- wp-includes
- wp-content/plugins/
- wp-content/themes/
- wp-content/uploads/
Hide & Disable:
Disabled unwanted features in WordPress before running an static export like:
- XML-RPC
- REST API URLs
- Emoji support
- Shortlink support
- WordPress version in HTML
and much more.
Get the Pro version
You can get the pro version here.
webtozip
We also developed a service called webtozip.com.
If all you need is an archive of an existing WordPress website and you don’t want to switch to a static site setup, we highly recommend using it instead of Simply Static.
Here are the benefits:
- it runs remotely (not on your server)
- it is probably faster than running it on your own server
- you don’t have to worry about your WordPress version or your PHP version
- you get the download link to the ZIP file via e-mail (no need for writing access on your server)
It uses the same codebase as Simply Static but is not a plugin. It is a service that runs on our servers.
Tutorials
I publish new tutorials on how to work with Simply Static and other tools on my blog.
You can check the current tutorials here