Why static sites are great (or, why you don’t need WordPress)

WordPress is often the first thing people think of when they think “I need a website for my business.”

WordPress is behind a large percentage of websites, good ones and bad. It’s also responsible for a large share of security breaches and ongoing maintenance bills.

Happening Interactive builds static sites instead. Here’s why we do that.

The problem(s) with WordPress

A WordPress website has to talk to a database to build every page. That comes with costs.

• It’s often kinda slow. Every page load runs code and queries a database (unless you have a caching plugin set up, which requires constant attention), so pages are slower than they need to be.
• It’s a security target. WordPress and its plugins are the most-attacked software on the web. One vulnerable plugin can open your site to an attacker. And then your site is full of links to overseas gambling sites, and you probably don’t even know it.
• It needs a lot of babysitting. Core updates, plugin updates, theme updates, backups, security patches. Miss one and things break, or get hacked. And sometimes the updates also break things.
• It’s actually pretty hard to work with. People have come up with ways to try to make Wordpress easier to work with, such as page bulders like Divi or WP Bakery or Elementor, but using these basically means your site will be eternally kind of broken.
  Wordpress itself tried to come up with something that would make Wordpress easier to work with, and the result was “Gutenberg”, which caused silly fights on the internet.
• It’s not as free as it looks. People often pick Wordpress because they’ve heard it’s free. But unless you are okay working with it straight out of the box, you’ll need at least a theme, and some plugins. But mostly, you’ll need an agency that is charging by the hour to fix your Wordpress iste.

Why static sites are better (for many sites)

Static sites have no database, no plugins, and no executable server-side code to exploit. So they are:

• Faster. Pages are pre-built and served in milliseconds.
• More secure. There’s no database or plug-ins to hack.
• Easier to edit. The pages of your website are simply files in a folder. There’s no database to worry about. We can set you up with a site editor, so you can log in and make text changes without looking at the code, but basically, editing the site is a lot like editing a Microsoft Word document.

Static sites can still have contact forms, blogs, image galleries, and analytics (things that Wordpress makes you download and install plugins to have). You get everything a small business actually needs, without so much bloat, risk, and upkeep.