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Big media companies use hosted WordPress with high traffic and to great success. You can even use WordPress as the backend to a static website (via Jekyll, Hug

Big media companies use hosted WordPress with high traffic and to great success. You can even use WordPress as the backend to a static website (via Jekyll, Hugo, etc) with extremely minimal effort. I did this nearly a decade ago for a webpage with tens of thousands of content pages and a million uniques/day. I then served it from a trio of $10 AWS boxes serving a very vanilla nginx configuration and a cloud loadbalancer. We didn't even bother paying for a CDN because it was never necessary. WordPress backend was on Pantheon and only accessible by employees via SSO. The entire migration (from just serving WordPress), redesign, pipelining, setting up Solr for site search, etc was all done by one developer in about 3 months...including training the content writers to use Markdown.

zakki 3y ago
So WordPress is just for internal usage (i.e. adding, editing content)? And then Hugo generates its content from the WP site? And then public internet access the web version from Hugo?
- busterarm 3y ago
  The public access the web version via nginx, technically. Jekyll or Hugo just spits out files. You set up your wordpress with custom post types and I wrote a Jekyll Generator plugin that builds content from a SQL query to WordPress' database. The whole pipeline to build and publish an update to the static site was around 5 minutes...with most of the build-time being eaten up by webpack to do its thing. Probably could have shaved off more time but at that point who cares. There are also WordPress plugins that can do this now, but understanding how WordPress stores data in its database is dead-simple. For a static site, a lot of tricks were pulled off to serve dynamic content and the site was still pretty tight and speedy. You can still get reliable Date stamps and CSRF tokens for formfills and stuff like that using nginx SSI.
  - zakki 3y ago
    Thanks

zakki 3y ago

So WordPress is just for internal usage (i.e. adding, editing content)? And then Hugo generates its content from the WP site? And then public internet access the web version from Hugo?

busterarm 3y ago
The public access the web version via nginx, technically. Jekyll or Hugo just spits out files. You set up your wordpress with custom post types and I wrote a Jekyll Generator plugin that builds content from a SQL query to WordPress' database. The whole pipeline to build and publish an update to the static site was around 5 minutes...with most of the build-time being eaten up by webpack to do its thing. Probably could have shaved off more time but at that point who cares. There are also WordPress plugins that can do this now, but understanding how WordPress stores data in its database is dead-simple. For a static site, a lot of tricks were pulled off to serve dynamic content and the site was still pretty tight and speedy. You can still get reliable Date stamps and CSRF tokens for formfills and stuff like that using nginx SSI.
- zakki 3y ago
  Thanks