Informed Webmaster

Some who have been in the web development industry and some small business owners who have been around for a while might remember building static websites either manually or with offline static site generators like Dreamweaver or FrontPage/Expression Web. Over time some people moved to content management systems like Wordpress or signed up for other online services to maintain their sites. Whether you decided to use a content management system or paid online service to keep your site up there is a price in doing so.

A content management system can cost you performance as it has to "fetch" your content from a database and integrate/insert the content with your template and any plugins you are using. This costs time and hence reduces the performance of your site.

There are also security concerns. While no site is safe from hackers trying to break in popular content management systems get targeted regularly.

An alternative is to use a system to create a static site. If your site is not updated too frequently or you have the skills to update manually it might be a good idea to look at a static site generator.

Most CMSes, as mentioned, do two things: they turn your content into HTML by combining it with your themes and templates, and then they make that HTML available as a website. A static site generator splits that process in two: the part where your content is turned into HTML happens on your own computer, giving you a folder full of HTML files. You then upload those HTML files to the web, where they are made available as a website to everybody....

...Because your website, the thing that people interact with, is simple HTML, and it is much more difficult for it to be hacked. And since the static site generator, which contains all the computer code that does the work, only runs on your own computer and is not exposed to the wider world at all, it cannot be hacked either. This means that security updates are largely unnecessary; you no longer need to be bothered with regular popups telling you to update your CMS, update your plugins, update your site...

Continued: 10 Best Free Static Site Generator Tools

Have you looked into static site generators?

Interesting; but can't you do the same thing with any cms , view the source, copy and paste, save, upload the saved page? Of course you have to upload the css and image folders also.

And you can run the cms on localhost and nothing hackable on the web at all?

Please tell me where I am wrong here.

I suppose you could install a CMS locally and do what you suggest.

I had a quick look at each of the generators required and the Publii looks like it would be the easiest to use for a newbie/less technical person. NOTE: didn't check out how standards compliant and SEO friendly that one is yet.

Accrete wrote: ↑Fri May 15, 2020 10:20 pm
I had a quick look at each of the generators required and the Publii looks like it would be the easiest to use for a newbie/less technical person. NOTE: didn't check out how standards compliant and SEO friendly that one is yet.

I actually agree with you on that one. At first I thought Hugo but again Hugo is something to be hacked.

The best that I personally know of is an incomplete WYSIWYG editor that I bought from code canyon. The editor portion is a nice complete product. But with that you still have to write your own file save or DB input code and it does not have any FTP properties.

I am actually forced to a version of this right now. When I reworked my scripts to be compatible with PHP 7 I created a query for the menu portion that works on XAMPP localhost but will not run on a real server. Having moved the site I had to make it work so I generated the menu section at home and placed static content on the live web page for now. As I am including that file it won't be all that hard to update.

I can see where doing whole standalone pages could become a problem if something that was on all the pages changed.

Now all I have to do is get the query working. The fun never ends.