 That's a pretty big stage Hello, everyone Perfect. So yeah, welcome everyone I want to give you a quick introduction into running a static WordPress website Let me quickly introduce myself a little bit further and There are not that many bullet points here, but I thought it's fine So I'm a WordPress developer since 2010 and I'm also the developer behind simply static which is a static site generator plug-in for WordPress We will see a quick view into it in a minute I'm also a solopreneur, which means I'm running Plug-in business full-time selling maintaining building plugins and so on so yeah, let's get started with static WordPress So yeah, the start is pretty obviously So we have to make our WordPress website static. What means static? We take our dynamic WordPress website and make converted back into HTML CSS JavaScript and obviously Leo image files Pretty much like 1999 but in a good way. So I built this little plug-in called simply static You can see a screenshot on the right hand side of the screen And the generation process is pretty much straightforward So you can install it for free from the WordPress open Pory repository Activated go to simply static generate and there's a big purple button label generate static files and you can click on it And the process starts running Depending on the size of the website that might take away So I would suggest for testing purposes. You might take a little bit Is a Simpler website to get started Once the process is finished, you will get the download link where you can click on and it will download the zip file containing all the static files So next step Let's talk about hosting It's a little bit different compared to what you might be used to when it comes to traditional WordPress hosting because you don't need an actual database and you Probably don't even need to have WordPress hosted somewhere and it's that use like something like doke local WP So Where do you host my static website? Well, that depends a little bit on how familiar you are with certain concepts For example GitHub So if you are familiar with GitHub and you know the basics to upload your files to GitHub repository and connected. I would suggest using GitHub pages or Cloudflip pages. Let's see to it to at the top Because they are free. They are pretty powerful and you get a lot out of the box without Having to worry about things like caching and so on If you aren't familiar with GitHub and you're looking for the quickest way to get started I would suggest starting with Netlify Netlify provides a little drag-and-drop zip uploader where you can simply drag and drop the zip file You got from simply static and uploaded to Netlify and you immediately get your static website running on a temporary Domain that you can use you can always switch on your preferred domain later If you're a fan of traditional deployment Which means using SFTP and copying over your files. You can do that as well The both the two most popular options here are digital ocean spaces and obviously Amazon S3 So now that we have a static version of our website and we have probably already deployed it to a hosting provider Let's take a quick look at some dynamic features and how we can make them work on a static WordPress website So, yeah pretty much every website these days has some kind of form be it a contact form or a newsletter sign-up and You still want to use like a contact form on your static website. Sure. So there are Different ways you can handle that there are external tools you can use but in my talk I'd like to prove I like to stay to WordPress as close as possible So we use in contact form seven. There's a free plug-in Available for contact from seven which is called CF7 to webhook that you can use to offload the submitted data from The form the user has submitted on the front end to an external webhook a pretty popular service You might already know is Zapia Zapia is like an no-code Automation tool and you can send off the the data from the contact form to Zapia and in Zapia you can configure Get all that data converted to an email and send it to me So this way your traditional WordPress website isn't involved anymore in the steps and you can still Use and style and modify your form based on contact from seven as you already used to The next popular thing is search so the traditional WordPress search works with PHP and URL parameters And both will not work on our static website So we need some kind of replacement while they are a lot of Different tools in the positive use case and some of them are pretty powerful and some of them are simpler I chose the simplest one which is Google custom search engine Google custom search engine is like a Little external tool you can sign up for free and you get like a little API key that you can use and in combination with the plug and mention WP Google search The only thing you have to do is copy in the API key and save the settings and you get a short code and returns that you can place anywhere on the web On your website and it will render a little search box Already available with auto suggest so once the user type something in Search results will pop up if he hits enter or clicks on the little search icon provided It will open a pop-up which contains search results from Google But limited to your own domain which is important because you don't want your competitors in that in your own search results, right? So yeah, that's pretty much the second important part now we have covered the basics and you probably Have a question in your mind Why the hell should I use the static website? So why the extra effort and what are the benefits? So let's quickly cover them One thing that a lot of people already know is that static WordPress websites are pretty fast That's because there is no database interaction. There's no dynamic processing Everything is already generated and we just deliver the static fire and optimized assets to the user or to the user's browser So speed is obvious, but the impact on the performance is even higher if you compare to a bigger website Let's say you have Traditional business website, but translated into seven languages depending on the plugin or On the on the framework you have used to do that that might take some time for the user to get the translated page so to Speed that up we can pre pre-generate and pre-convert the HTML files for each language and once you use a switch the language He automatically gets the translated HTML page back and that is a lot faster than compared to a traditional Multilingual website even with a powerful caching and some kind of premium hosting Another important benefit for me even more important than speed But I know every everyone is kind of hyped about performance Is security so a static website is almost unhackable. Why? Yeah, because Hacker doesn't have any Expert vectors that you can use to inject malicious code into your website or Try to inject some additional styles or whatsoever so because your website is Static and your database and WordPress is Either offline or protected behind basic or end or a firewall A hacker will have a pretty hard time to do anything relevant to your website as long as it's static The third point and I'm sure you agree with me is maintenance So Updating the WordPress website can be a pretty daunting task, especially if it's not your main business Let's say the average business with a website How often do people take care of updates? There's several Plug-in security updates each week. There are multiple WordPress updates each year. Maybe your themes updated each month Who knows so it's cool if everything works as expected if you click update But that's not always the case. So if you have a static website, you have like a snapshot in time So you have your static website running no matter what happens It will remain unchanged on the other side. You have your WordPress website with us now practically a free staging environment for you to update to test to Do whatever you want and only if you're happy with the results and you have tested everything You will update the static website and get the updated changes to your Official websites, so to say there are a couple of other benefits. I tried to keep a charge One I like to mention is cost reduction. So I'm sure we can argue about that, but I would say premium WordPress hosting is kind of expensive Especially if you want something secure reliable Automated backups done for you. So compared to that static hosting is insanely cheap So we're talking about depending on the website site and service about one euro or dollar per month Or even per year depending on the traffic the site of the the size of the websites the amount of pages and so on Another thing it's not really a benefit, but a question I often get is the difference between headless and Static WordPress headless WordPress often use Jamstack which requires to rebuild your existing website or Build a new design based on a modern JavaScript framework like React or Vue.js Swelty or whatever While as static WordPress is a static replication of your existing websites, so you Will still use your existing tools your existing theme your existing plugins You may have to adjust one or the or another, but all in all it's your WordPress website Replicated as a static one that you can use right away without any technical requirements involved so That's all for me One thing I like to notice certainly I missed to add the download link to the presentation I collected a pretty detailed page Containing all kinds of tutorials and additional links and resources. I will share that in a minute on Twitter But if you see me running around There's a QR code on my back You can scan that and there's a link to the resource page where you can download the presentation and all the additional information So that's all for me. Thanks for your attention and have a good day