In the past, we’ve talked about how WordPress squares up with other popular content management systems like Drupal, Joomla, and even Squarespace. But what if you’re trying to decide between WordPress vs static HTML for your website?
At a basic level, this is kind of a general debate between using a database-driven content management system (like WordPress) or writing all of the HTML/CSS yourself along with possibly using a framework.
To help you make your decision, we’ll explain what these terms mean and then jump into some of the pros and cons of each approach.
- Difference Between WordPress and Static HTML
- Pros and Cons of WordPress
- Pros and Cons of Static HTML Website
- Use WordPress as a Static Website Generator
Difference Between WordPress and Static HTML
In the end, everything comes out as HTML on the frontend. That is, your site’s code is going to look something like this no matter if you’re using WordPress or a static HTML website:
The important difference is in how that HTML comes into existence.
With static HTML, that story is pretty simple. You, or your developer, writes the code (including your content). Then, once it’s on the server, it’s always like that. There’s no background processing going on – your site is always right there in its finished form.
WordPress, on the other hand, is a content management system that uses PHP and a database. In simple terms, that means that when someone visits your WordPress site, your server “assembles” your site by:
- Executing the PHP code to put together the HTML version of your site
- Querying your database to get the content to insert into that HTML
What Is a Content Management System, Then?
Above, we told you that WordPress is a content management system, but we didn’t really explain what that means. A content management system, often abbreviated as CMS, is software that helps you create, manage, and modify content on a website without needing to interact directly with the code.
For example, instead of needing to manually add your content by formatting it with HTML like you would for a static HTML website, you can just input your content using the WordPress editor and WordPress will handle displaying it on your site:
Similarly, if you ever wanted to edit that content at a later date, you could just go in and edit it using that same editor, rather than needing to directly edit the static HTML file on your server.
Pros and Cons of WordPress
We’ll get into some of the pros and cons of a static HTML website in a second, but let’s start with some of the reasons that over 43.6% of the entire Internet is now using WordPress.
Code-Free Content Management
The biggest benefit of WordPress is that it can almost completely eliminate code from the day-to-day management of your website. Instead, most of the actions that you’ll want to take can be performed using a graphic interface.
With this graphic interface, you can:
- Create new content
- Change how your site looks
- Change how your site functions
- Configure important SEO settings
- Perform plenty of other important actions
Unless you live and breathe HTML/CSS (and probably even if you do), this approach is going to make it a lot easier to manage every aspect of your website.
Easy to Change How Your Site Looks
Every WordPress site needs something called a theme. Your theme determines how your site looks on the frontend. To install a new WordPress theme, you basically click a button or upload a single file and your site instantly adopts that styling:
On the other hand, with a static HTML site, you control how your site looks using your own CSS. Not only is this time-consuming to set up in the first place, it will be similarly time-consuming if you ever want to radically change how your static HTML site looks in the future. Yes, there are CSS frameworks you can use to speed this process up, but it still requires more work and expertise to be able to manage.
We know this first hand due to the fact that a majority of the Kinsta website was created with good ole Github commits (suggested reading: git vs Github). Yes, we utilize a WordPress theme and framework, and our code is wrapped in WordPress functions, but most of what you see on our site was created by our team. This can sometimes allow for greater flexibility, but it also requires having developers on staff. If you want to save time and don’t have full-time developers, going with a pre-built WordPress theme can drastically speed up your workflow.
Additionally, you need to worry about making all of your CSS responsive (AKA look good on mobile), whereas almost every single WordPress theme is responsive by default nowadays.
Easy to Add New Functionality
WordPress also offers something called plugins that allow you to easily extend the functionality of your site. Want to add a contact form to your site? With static HTML, you’ll need to deal with validation and what happens with the data that a user submits. With WordPress, you just install a plugin…
The difficulty gap gets even bigger with larger features. Want to add a forum to your site? Good luck doing that on your own. But with WordPress, you just need to install a forum plugin.
You can even quickly tack on eCommerce or social network functionality.
Rapid Development and Changes
The combination of themes and plugins, along with WordPress’ general functionality as a content management system, mean that you can quickly spin up even complicated websites.
Static HTML can be quick for a very basic site with just a few pages… but if you need any non-standard functionality, WordPress is almost certainly going to let you build a site faster.
Want more advantages? Check out these 10 good reasons why you should use WordPress.
You may also be interested in 60 Awesome Web Development Tools to Use in 2024.
Are There Any Cons to Using WordPress?
You’ll find some people saying things like “static HTML websites load faster” or “static HTML websites rank better in Google.” But some of this should be taken with a grain of salt. While it’s true that PHP and a database introduces additional load time and delays, it’s not that difficult to get WordPress load times under one second – which is plenty fast.
You should ask yourself, is having a slightly faster static site worth giving up the advantages WordPress has to offer? Also, PHP performance has improved drastically over the past five years. In our recent PHP benchmark tests, we concluded that PHP 7.3 can handle 3x as many requests (transactions) per second to that of PHP 5.6. 🚀
There are also ways you can easily negate PHP and database delays by using caching to serve static HTML versions of your pages. This means every page load can essentially load lightning fast, just as it would with a static HTML site.
How much does caching impact a WordPress site? Here is a quick test on a WordPress blog before and after cache.
Without Cache
We first ran a test with cache disabled on the WordPress blog.
As you can see there is a significant delay in the first HTML DOC load. This is due to it not serving from cache on the server.
With Cache
We then ran a test with cache enabled on the WordPress blog. Nothing else was changed.
As you can see there is a massive improvement. In fact, simply serving up the initial page from cache on the server decreased the load time by 32.2%.
Kinsta automatically handles caching at the server-level for all WordPress hosting clients. This means you don’t have to hassle with third-party caching plugins.
We also offer Edge Caching for free, a feature that cuts the time needed to serve cached WordPress HTML by an average of more than 50%.
When it comes to the ranking rumors you might hear, there are great WordPress SEO plugins that let you optimize your SEO strategy by controlling every aspect of your site’s technical and on-page SEO. If WordPress sites really performed worse than static HTML sites in the search rankings, you wouldn’t see it being used by massive platforms like The Wirecutter or TechCrunch.
There are a few small disadvantages, though, and the first is maintenance. While choosing quality managed WordPress hosting can eliminate much of the worst maintenance, you’ll still be responsible for making sure that the WordPress core software, plugins, and themes are updated and compatible. This is fairly easy nowadays, but it is something that you don’t need to do with a static HTML website.
The second disadvantage would probably be quality. Due to the extreme popularity of WordPress, there are a lot of bad plugins and themes out there. And free solutions sometimes just drop off the map entirely. Sorting through the bad to find the good can be time-consuming.
Pros and Cons of a Static HTML Website
You heard from WordPress – but now let’s dig into some of the pros and cons of a static HTML website.
There’s No Underlying Software to Maintain
We kind of talked about this a second ago, but let’s rehash it quickly here because it is one of the major benefits of static HTML.
When you use WordPress and themes/plugins, you’re responsible for updating all that underlying code and making sure there aren’t any compatibility issues. While this is pretty simple (you usually just need to click a button), it is something that you need to do to keep your website secure and functioning.
On the other hand, if you’ve written clean static HTML, you should be able to pretty much leave things alone and never worry about updates.
Easier Access to the Underlying Code
While WordPress lets you access all the underlying code to your site, a static HTML website will make it a bit simpler to input certain types of markup. Instead of needing to deal with theme template files and the WordPress loop, everything is right there in front of you.
For example, while there are schema plugins for WordPress, you can more easily control schema markup on a static HTML website.
What Are the Disadvantages of Creating a Static HTML Website?
While a static HTML website is certainly fine for a basic website, the main issues come about when you try to scale up, either in terms of the amount of content or functionality.
Most of these disadvantages are simply the opposite of WordPress’ advantages. Namely:
- Adding or editing content isn’t user-friendly because you’ll need to dig into the code.
- Adding new functionality requires that you code it yourself.
- Changing how your site looks requires rewriting your CSS.
Additionally, unless you actually know HTML/CSS yourself, all of these things will also require paying a developer, whereas WordPress would let you do them yourself, for the most part.
Use WordPress as a Static Website Generator
Static website generators differ from the above two options slightly as they take a content management system’s content, such as WordPress, combine it with a theme and generate static HTML pages. Jekyll is one of the most popular ones, which you can use to host your whole website or blog on GitHub Pages and push your new content with one command. The downside? It’s not easy (to say the least) to set it up, and even for developers, it can be time-consuming.
If you have a free afternoon to learn more about Jekyll then take a look at this article by Mike Neumegen. Alternatively, a flat-file CMS like Grav can give you easier content management while still avoiding the need for a database.
If you’re technically savvy, it’s even possible to get the best of both worlds and use WordPress as a static HTML website generator. However, you just have to remember that if you use WordPress in this way, you’ll have to make sacrifices:
- There won’t be any “real-time” dynamic content on your site, at all.
- No recommended articles for you or widgets that change for each visitor.
- You can’t use WordPress’s built-in commenting system.
Essentially, everything that is server-side (PHP) generated will become static and updated manually. Static website generators will create a complete HTML page based on your content and once it’s done, no matter how many people visit your site, it won’t be regenerated; not unless you type in a specific command on your computer.
Suggested reading: How to Upload an HTML File to WordPress.
Developers solve the commenting “problem” by either not using it at all or switching to JavaScript-based solutions, the most popular being Disqus or Facebook comments.
There are a couple of WordPress caching plugins that you can use to create static HTML files of your posts and pages, but if you’re using Nginx as your web server (if you aren’t, you really should, but that’s a topic for another article) you can just flip the full page caching switch on and set it to expire in a day or a week. The longer period you can “afford” to set it to, the better.
What happens next is that the first visitor will have the server generate the complete, cached HTML files and any consecutive visitors within the predefined expiration period will get served those files. Here a Kinsta, our servers use the nginx fastcgi cache module for page caching. How to set it up, you ask? Well if you manage your own servers here’s an extremely detailed guide by DigitalOcean that you can follow.
If you’re a Kinsta client, this is automatic for every WordPress site and the cache by default expires every one hour. You can, however, open up a ticket with our support team within your MyKinsta dashboard and request a longer cache duration. Just please make sure you fully understand the consequences of doing so.
Cloudflare Full Page Cache
You can also utilize Cloudflare page rules with WordPress and serve your entire site from cache. We provide you all the details here on how to set up Cloudflare cache for your WordPress posts and pages.
This can be very beneficial for sites that are launching an event or are expecting a huge surge of traffic. Remember though, if you are serving entirely from cache, you will most likely run into issues with WooCommerce checkout, your WordPress admin toolbar, and other various things that you’ll need to either fix or find workarounds.
Suggested reading: How to Set up Cloudflare APO for WordPress.
We Provide the Best of Both Worlds
We don’t generally recommend serving your entire site from cache unless you have time to properly test everything. For example, when it comes to WooCommerce: you can cache the “static” front page, categories, product pages (if you don’t change them too often) and then yes, it will load almost instantly! But as soon as someone clicks “add to cart” you’ll have to switch to a non-cached version otherwise they’ll see the cart always empty.
Here at Kinsta, we have server-level rules in place for ecommerce solutions and blogs to ensure what should be cached is, and what shouldn’t, isn’t.
A few examples include certain WooCommerce and EDD pages like cart, my-account, and checkout, are excluded from caching. And users automatically bypass the cache when the woocommerce_items_in_cart cookie or edd_items_in_cart cookie is detected to ensure a smooth and in-sync checkout process.
This provides you with a fasting loading WordPress site, but without having to worry about things breaking.
Don’t want to host your entire site with Kinsta, but want to take advantage of the dynamic functionality for your WordPress blog? You might want to look into loading your site over a reverse proxy. We support these types of setups.
WordPress or Static?
Now for the million dollar question… If you’re just building a small website that’s unlikely to change or require new content, static HTML is a fine approach. But for anything else, WordPress is almost certainly going to be a better choice. This is especially true if you don’t have access to a developer.
Its ease of use, combined with its extensibility, are the main reasons why it’s now powering over 43.6% of all the websites on the Internet. Now over to you – would you ever build a site with static HTML over WordPress? Or have you gone down the static website generator route?
Check out our managed WordPress hosting, or host your static sites for free with Kinsta’s Static site hosting.
Brian has a huge passion for WordPress, has been using it for over a decade, and even develops a couple of premium plugins. Brian enjoys blogging, movies, and hiking. Connect with Brian on Twitter.
I would suggest Grav for mid-static sites, even thus it has evolved very quickly and it is becoming quite versatile and dynamic. Converting WordPress to Grav is not that difficult since they provide a plugin for it. Grav was built by Joomla! Developers, by the way.
For plain, static sites I would say Foundation Framework would work best since it is more lightweight than Bootstrap and with a shorter learning curve, and if you combine it with Atom snippets, then you have a winner when it comes to update content.
I must admit, I love coding static sites more than using WordPress. ;) And of course I use a static site generator, mainly Hugo. Wich is proven to work even with big sites such as Smashing Magazine.
Yes, there is only a slight difference between static sites and a cached WordPress site. But the biggest Pro you don’t even mention here: security. The most popular CMS with 30% of all websites is most popular to be attacked as well. And with the number of installed plugins and themes the potential security flaws increase exponentially. Which is why nearly 60% of all websites in the world are still static sites. :D
With static site generators you don’t lose the ability to easily edit content. Most of them use markdown. And if you don’t want the hassle to learn that easy »language«, you always can use a headless CMS to manage your content. Even »live« dynamic content is possible, e.g. with JavaScript/ AJAX. And last but not least you can automate almost every step of the process in a way a CMS never can.
I always kind of got the feeling that static HTML was better for SEO.
This article definitely helps me understand the debate a little more clearly.
I’ve seen some devs make some really great sites without a CMS and they were just so lightening fast!
We just switched, not by choice, from static to WordPress, and I don’t code, and personally I dislike the WordPress interface and everything about it. We have to consistently dig to find what we are wanting to change, management wise it is a nightmare, trying to give access to those who don’t even understand computers the ability to change their section of the page is nearly impossible. No thanks, I don’t even like to program or code and personally I would rather go back to straight coding rather than this WordPress. I am always trying to find ways to convince powers that be to just let us revert back to HTML coding so users can do their changes easily.
Think it all depends of what kind of site you’re developing.
If you want to make a one-page landing page with almost no function, then sure. Coding from the bottom seems like a good idea. I would never create a website for a client without a CMS, as they wouldn’t be able to make any changes themselves if they dont know coding. Most companies evolve, hence they need changes in their content and functions. This is easily done in a CMS like WordPress, rather than the code. I’ve worked with HTML/CSS + Javascript for a lot of years, creating websites for clients and myself, but i switched to WordPress, as it was too frustrating making all new changes to code, rather than having a CMS system to back up the front-end part of a website.
I will never switch back to hardcoding a website, because of the time I would have to use compared to creating a site in wordpress.
Hello, I had to convert my wordpress site to html only because of overuse resources on the server and was shutting down all other wordpress sites and I couldn’t allow that.
Anyways, I was getting alot of traffic towards it and then when I had it converted to html, all traffic stopped all of the sudden.
Would there be a reason for this?
Automated bots tend to attack known WordPress endpoints like /wp-login.php. On the static site, these endpoints don’t exist and don’t consume PHP resources. That would be a potential reason.
This is a tough one and a question I’m trying to answer myself.
I have spent the past week playing with WordPress and it’s been a thoroughly miserable experience.
Downloaded themes often look nothing like they do in the previews, the theme I did pick created errors and I’ve read horror stories of developers constantly having to deal with angry clients as they wrestle with the need to keep the core software updated whilst the plugins and themes they use become incompatible, with clients refusing to pay, believing that they have paid for the website and it shouldn’t just suddenly break.
For extending functionality, WordPress is peerless, but I can’t resist just putting a website online for a client and not having to worry about getting a call complaining that things have broken.
I use Site Cake to let customers easily and safely edit their websites and code canyon are pretty good for finding plugins which extend base functionality.
I honestly don’t know where to go with it. The speed seems fine and the interface seems easy enough for clients to use. I’m sure with more work I can figure out why these templates aren’t looking right, but I love coding these things to the metal. It takes longer but the end result is built specifically for the client and you can really tell the difference between that and a template derivative.
Anyway, interesting article. I’ll see what I do!
I find this blog post quite useful. As a website developer, I find the list of modern web development blogs quite helpful. Since, I am a beginner in this web development world; I had a little knowledge of the trendy web development techniques. The post helps me a lot to find the right web development technology.
This post has been helpful, however, I still find it difficult to go all-in on a WordPress site. I have an HTML site with a WordPress blog. Do you think it would be an okay idea to correct the technical SEO errors on my page and leave the main page HTML with a WordPress blog for uploading content? I’ve been advised that everything should be switched to WordPress, but I’m afraid that it’s just not necessary. Please let me know what you think.
How are you handling the HTML site and WordPress blog? Are both on the same domain (e.g. domain.com and domain.com/blog) or are they on separate domains? With regard to whether you should go all in on WordPress, that would be something you need to decide. Personally, I’d just use one platform unless there was a very compelling reason not to (for example if part of the site was a React app). Keeping everything in WordPress will allow you to focus SEO optimization on one web property instead of duplicating efforts.