Wordpress Users: What scares you the most about static websites?

I have a handful of Jekyll sites. These are micro-niche sites, things that I knew could add some extra revenue to my business and I had no intention of flipping.

I agree with what @Steve Brownlie was basically saying - that the ease-of-use of WordPress prevents a site being unfairly devalued to 90% of prospective buyers.

Beyond a few projects I have with the intention of flipping I have absolutely no use for WordPress... I hate it, it's caused me more problems in terms of hours spent than learning HTML/CSS ever did.

I started up with Hugo the other day. I absolutely love it, even compared to Jekyll. There's no going back to WordPress on any future projects for me. Once my existing ones are flipped there will be no more flipping anyway.

I don't concur with @Ryuzaki regarding Static Sites being good for little 10 page sites. With static site generators like Hugo (which still create static sites) I think that you could easily have many hundreds of pages all managed and deployed easily.

What interests me the most about WordPress vs X is that there are so many passionate and angry WordPress supporters out there who will defend it against all logic... I think it's a pointless argument, you either know or you don't.
 
In my case, what kept me with Wordpress for the longest time wasn't quite fear as much as concern. Concern in not knowing much about the ecosystem of static site generators. The whole "stick with what you know" thing. Also concern in some of my own deficiencies in programming skill. I think most of that concern stemmed from wondering how to replicate plugin functionality I was using.

Over time, I've come to realize I never even needed many of those plugins in the first place. In other cases, being able to take a step back and see things from more of a systems programming standpoint, I've had realizations that there were simply better ways I could achieve something without needing some third party plugin.

For example, generating pages from data files. Like taking a JSON file and generating a page for each object in that file. The end result being, for certain page types no longer needing a separate markdown or other file for every single page on a site.

What kept me moving the direction of static sites is, I always had this feeling there was a better way to be building a lot of the sites I was building. Building a database-powered SMB website for some local business... when they have less than 10 site pages... Just feels like using a sledgehammer to hit a nail.

The dilemma I'd always come to, though, is what to do if a client wants a CMS so they can edit content themselves? That kept me on the fence with static sites for awhile. Thankfully, in the last few years a number of CMS solutions have popped up to solve that. Some, like Netlify, are actually free or close to it. There are others as well, such as: Contentful, Forestry, Cockpit

With most of these newer standalone CMS options, however, knowledge of Javascript is becoming a more important factor. That's going to be a pain point for many, because the more time spent coding means less time on efforts that drive ROI. For others, maybe writing a few lines of JS is no big deal.

Another +1 for Hugo. Out of all the SSGs I've used, I've been by far the most productive with it. It'll easily handle several thousand pages, even with complex queries. Several users in that community have stress tested it up to I believe ~650K pages. At that point, build times are in the tens of minutes.
 
Does anyone know of a decent, affiliate / marketing oriented theme for a SSG such as Jekyll or Hugo or is everyone pretty much spinning up their own code?
 
stoic0 said:
Does anyone know of a decent, affiliate / marketing oriented theme for a SSG such as Jekyll or Hugo or is everyone pretty much spinning up their own code?
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I'd recommend searching for a static site theme that you like and incorporating that into Hugo or other SSG (I prefer Hugo). As far as incorporating things like Analytics, Adsense or other ad networks, that can be done with partials/includes depending on the SSG you choose. Once you get the hang of a good SSG, you'll begin to see how easy it is to incorporate ideas from other themes/layouts into the site without a lot of effort and without having to rely on yet another plugin like the WordPress folks have to deal with.
 
Why do all static site generators require you to use the command line? Why don’t they have a local GUI that runs on my desktop, which can take all the markdown or yaml files and export html to a directory?

I don’t know how to use the command line and don’t have much interest in learning the language of it, but I see the value in SSGs.

I bet there would be a whole lot more adoption by people like me if I could run the SSG from a GUI. What am I missing?
 
The command line is one of the most powerful things you can learn. It will unlock pretty much every programming language available, every Unix/Linux utility out there and tons of other things that would be of great use to pretty much any marketer. As for a GUI?

GUI design isn't the easiest thing in the world. The vast majority of them are just running commands behind the scenes anyway. Not only does the dev(s) have to make sure they are capturing the correct output of the commands the GUI is actually running correctly, many additional steps have to be included for error handling (this can get extreme) and to essentially protect the end user from themselves. GUIs will almost always be very limited and only offer a subset of what can be done with the command line. This is why I despise pretty much any type of cpanel.

In the case of something like Hugo, there are packages that sometimes need to be installed via node (npm) and/or other package managers and it's really not a good idea to build a GUI around that. See what happened (and is happening) to WordPress trying to be everything for everyone? Personally I'd rather have SSGs like Hugo remain command line only and let the rest of the world continue to rely on one click installers and plugins because GUI. I consider a well make static site a major competitive advantage.
 
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Grav flat file cms has a nice admin panel now, for free. Looks a bit like old WP... It also has plugin that will turn markup text input into regular text input, like in WP. There is also a plugin that allows for DB connection. I would say that grav is a good way to start with static sites in easy way.

Im still using WP and will for as long as clients use it. But my tiny business site is grav and it stays that way for sure.
 
mikey3times said:
Why do all static site generators require you to use the command line? Why don’t they have a local GUI that runs on my desktop, which can take all the markdown or yaml files and export html to a directory?
Click to expand...


I would buy this and host static sites if there was a GUI
 
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