I have whole rants about this, based on bitter experience trying to convince marketing people to stop using WP and just use a static site.
It comes down to ease of editing. A WP site optimises for the editor. Not the hosting, not the tech folk, not the accountants, and definitely not the reader. The people who edit the site get to say how it's implemented.
If you give them the choice (as I have) between a site that renders in <100ms, is completely secure, and costs literally nothing to host, but requires markdown files and a bit of Git to deploy, and a Wordpress site that's as slow as hell, costs a fortune, is insecure, needs constant maintenance, but has a nice editing process, then they go for WP every time.
I'm always confused as to why these particular people get to be the ones who make the choice. But I've repeated this experiment multiple times and it has always come back with the same result.
In 2016, I was working at an agency making brochureware for local businesses. I remember one of our clients wanted us to add a small iframe for a reservation system to their website they had built. They sent us a single word document. Turns out they were just exporting it as HTML (which it seems like Word does still support today!) and throwing it onto some cheap shared web hosting provider. It worked great for them. They could always keep their online menu updated because... it was exported from the word doc they create the print menu from. At the time we sort of made fun of them internally... which I feel bad thinking about now. It's actually a genius idea when you have a million other more important things to do at a restaurant.
It's still easier to make a static site. I think the authoring tools to generate HTML just currently suck, or if they don't suck they have some process that needs to run on the server to serve the site.
We’re dealing with this big time in Asheville now. When cell service came back at all, everyone had shitty intermittent 3G, and none of the websites we needed for basic survival information would load. A bunch of good people created some text only news sites, and today I noticed that the Buncombe county website finally has a low bandwidth site, but even then when I inspected it, it had 130k of bootstrap css and 50k of jQuery blocking rendering. It’s great that people are doing this work, but citizens needed this a week and a half ago. By now, I’ve figured out where to get water, food, non potable water, etc. Seeing tech fail so badly through all this has been eye opening for me, in a depressing way.
> the web doesn't belong just to software engineers. The more we make the web complex, the more we push normal users into the enclosures that we like to call social networks.
Big up this author. Here’s a recent podcast about the recent conference this quote came from (Squiggle Conf), https://changelog.com/jsparty/339
Most people's expectations of what a "basic website" should do have gone way up over time.
Even as a programmer, I've fallen into the static site generator trap a few times.
It's annoying to start a side project with a static site generator and then realise I want to add a small feature and suddenly I wish I'd just started with a simple Rails or PHP app.
Nowadays, if I want a static site I just start with a folder of html files.
It's way less complicated and quicker to go from idea -> execution without bike-shedding or procrastination on tools.
I'm pretty happy writing html and css manually though—I don't recommend it for everyone.
The other cool thing is if I then decide to "abort" to rails.. I can copy the folder of html files into the rails public/ folder.. pretty easy upgrade path.
marcus_holmes ·73 days ago
It comes down to ease of editing. A WP site optimises for the editor. Not the hosting, not the tech folk, not the accountants, and definitely not the reader. The people who edit the site get to say how it's implemented.
If you give them the choice (as I have) between a site that renders in <100ms, is completely secure, and costs literally nothing to host, but requires markdown files and a bit of Git to deploy, and a Wordpress site that's as slow as hell, costs a fortune, is insecure, needs constant maintenance, but has a nice editing process, then they go for WP every time.
I'm always confused as to why these particular people get to be the ones who make the choice. But I've repeated this experiment multiple times and it has always come back with the same result.
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graypegg ·74 days ago
It's still easier to make a static site. I think the authoring tools to generate HTML just currently suck, or if they don't suck they have some process that needs to run on the server to serve the site.
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dimal ·74 days ago
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brianzelip ·74 days ago
Big up this author. Here’s a recent podcast about the recent conference this quote came from (Squiggle Conf), https://changelog.com/jsparty/339
dhotson ·74 days ago
Even as a programmer, I've fallen into the static site generator trap a few times.
It's annoying to start a side project with a static site generator and then realise I want to add a small feature and suddenly I wish I'd just started with a simple Rails or PHP app.
Nowadays, if I want a static site I just start with a folder of html files. It's way less complicated and quicker to go from idea -> execution without bike-shedding or procrastination on tools.
I'm pretty happy writing html and css manually though—I don't recommend it for everyone.
The other cool thing is if I then decide to "abort" to rails.. I can copy the folder of html files into the rails public/ folder.. pretty easy upgrade path.
Show replies