Ditch That Old WordPress Site

Web Design opinions on why your business or personal website could benefit from moving on from WordPress.

Web Design Blog – Static Site Generators

Today in our Web Design Blog we are talking about Static Site Generators. Static site generators (SSG), like Next.js and Gatsby work by combining the data, content, and pages before deploying them to the internet. This is different from traditional sites that have to request their data from a server before sending the page back to the user.

General Benefits

• Speed: Pages load faster than traditional sites, and incredibly faster than WordPress sites.
• SEO: Most, if not all SSG’s come with built in tools to optimize search engine Optimization right out of the box.
• Security: SSG’s don’t suffer from the huge security risks that come with traditional sites and WordPress sites do.
• Customization: Limitless customization in regard to the function and design of the website.

Benefits for CMS’s

Static site generators even work with content management systems. Anytime someone uploads new content they can be set up to trigger a rebuild of the site into new static files and deploy those. Static sites are heavily optimized and load incredibly fast. All this makes them the perfect replacement for all those broken WordPress sites you see everywhere.

A Quick Defense for WordPress

To clarify, I’m referring to the coupled version of WordPress. I think it’s perfectly fine to use as a headless content management system (CMS). In fact, if you’re viewing this on the Grand Rapids Tech that’s what I used to upload this post!

Did you know as of October 1st, 2020 39% of all websites use WordPress? Source: W3Techs

That’s an incredible amount of broken plugins out there on the internet!

Good Candidates for a New Web Design

Almost anyone with a WordPress site could and should be converted over. They’ll get all the speed benefits that keep people on your site. Security isn’t an issue because you don’t have a bunch of broken plugins. You can keep the WordPress CMS if you want or use a cleaner, easier to use one like Netlify.

Developed Professionally

Why pay someone to build a WordPress site for you, when you could have someone build something better for the same price? A professional site that loads incredibly fast, uses SEO best practices, is free of security risks, and comes with developer support?