Are there any plugins that do this? I have a subdomain multisite (ie domain.com, *.domain.com) that I’d like to convert to a static HTML site since I don’t update it anymore.
Unsure how current this information is; I’d be interested to know myself:
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Latest version of Simply Static doesn’t work with CP at this time as it requires functions included in WP 5.9. When CP v2.0 is released, it should work again. In the meantime, you can use an older version (2.1.0) of Simply Static that’s compatible with CP.
Go to the Advanced section of the plugin:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/advanced/
And under the Previous Versions section from the dropdown, select 2.1.0 and click download.
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The easiest way to make static HTML pages is to copy paste the pages source. Then add each .html file to the root of the site (home.html, about-us.html, contact.html) and then rename index.php to _index.php.
This ONLY works if you have a non-dynamic content on the site. If the site is changing everyday, then you would have to use wget command in Linux and update each changed file each time it is changed. Wget - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation
I have went as far as copying every page source and adding an entire static site to the domain (sub domain) as raw HTML and completely removed the WP (ClassicPress) instance from the server. Of course you have to be sure you have all rels to dependencies accounted for which, you can do by copying those files and making directories to match the paths of the rel links.
wget is the best for copying sites prior to any huge upgrade or site change. It gives you a safe backup in HTML and you won’t need any database to save every page. Now if you have tons of products, the drawback is, that you will have a folder for every product and every folder will have an index.html with the pages content. So it gets rather large to the point where you have to remove every index dot hyml file and rename it. But it might be the way I use wget and you can find a better way.
To copy entire site use wget --mirror --convert-links --adjust-extension --page-requisites --no-parent
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@tradesouthwest This is pretty similar to the software WinHT Track, isn’t it?
I tried using that, it generated a folder for each page on my site, it seemed a little - - inelegant, I guess. But if this is the only way to do it…
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@joyously is an expert of the JAMstack (converting a dynamic site into static one like CP to HTML)
She explained to me that there is also a plugin that does this that is called WPtoStatic (I can’t recall if it’s the correct name tho, might be WPtoHTML) but I do not know if it is still compatible with CP and I surely don’t know precisely how it works/what it does because I never used it myself.
Will check it tomorrow morning and report it here so that if it works with CP you can try it.
EDITED TO ADD link to WPtoStatic website.
It seems they use Netilify to deploy the static version of the site. you will need to ask them if it can be used on CP but it’s an alternative to the one mentioned by @viktor above, so I think it might not work, but it’s worth trying it and asking them which old version could work.
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Definitely a crucial plugin that would need to be reformed to work with CP. HTML static is important to many devs, so it may be worth finding a way to get one of the currently WP supported plugins to do the trick for CP.
Most of them use some type of external holding CDN for doing parts of the conversion. Asynchronous requests and background processing in WordPress is used by SimplyStatic as well as some other vendor tools/dependencies. Including HtmlDomParsers and other complex extractors and fetchers. So it is not an easy thing to do as a “minimal viable product” and does require some serious template(ing) utilities…
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A few years back in an interview I was asked to demonstrate how to handle a high traffic for a WordPress website.
I mentioned a couple of possible solutions, but in that particular time I suggested to use WP Super Cache.
I asked them the hypothetical question of how often they would update their content and they mentioned something like, let’s assume no more than twice a year!
So, what I did with this plugin was to direct my NGINX settings to first serve the already generated static HTML files (if there were any, that is), else to serve PHP files dynamically like it should do so.
It worked like a charm and I got myself a nice 12-month contract for a massive e-commerce project.
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I checked latest version and it requires WP 5.9, so it won’t work with CP v1.x. That’s why I didn’t mention it. It should work with v2.x once it’s released.
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