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The difference is the experience. With WP, you sign up for a hosting service that offers WP, get a text box, type things in it, and press "submit" and you've g
by shagie 2y ago
The difference is the experience. With WP, you sign up for a hosting service that offers WP, get a text box, type things in it, and press "submit" and you've got a page on the web.
The challenge is getting a similar low friction way to deploy content with a static site generator. Github pages is kind of ok - but it requires the person to have a base level understanding of git (commit and push).
To dethrone WP, there needs to be a similar experience. I'm reminded of iWeb of old ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IWeb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IWeb ). This isn't saying it can't be done - but the underlying technology isn't the issue.
That gets the 70% solution. For the next 20%, you're targeting people that have some php skill and can tinker with templates and databases but aren't... Software Engineers. A sibling of mine falls into this category. Needs more than a static site generator but doesn't have the time / experience / background to design a bespoke site for the use case. Cobbling together WordPress that was inherited from a previous iteration of the organization with the occasional ChatGPT helping out question is enough to handle the needs of the site and its users.
For the remaining 10%, you've got the people who use WordPress and are familiar with how to make it really work. Static sites are an option for some cases here, but their experience is deep in the WP stack rather than crafting the site by hand themselves. It's easier to modify the templates and tools they've developed to work in WordPress than it is to create a new one. And it gives their clients an easy way to update the content.
For me? A static site would work... and it's in the bottom of my list of things to do to migrate to Hugo or the like. Or maybe even make my own as a personal project (I have a fondness for the old accessible web).
However, I don't believe that the static site generator works for the majority of the WP userbase in its current form (as much as I'd like it to be the case).