Hexo VS wp2static

A lot of great suggestions here and some stuff I’ve never heard of before!

Throwing my own suggestion into the ring, as I was just looking into this last week.

I started setting up a blog using Hexo. It’s another Node based SSG that uses markdown and supports tags. It has a lot of neat plugins that people have developed, too.

I like it so far!

https://github.com/hexojs/hexo

In my case, the latter is not possible because this blog is a static site, generated via Hexo and hosted on GitHub. It simply lacks a modifiable active server component.

Hexo — best lightweight SSG

Previously I've used Nuxt2 and even sooner - hexo.io

To make their creation easier, numerous open-source static websites generators are available: Jekyll, Hugo, Gatsby, Hexo, etc. Most of the time, the content is managed through static (ideally Markdown) files or a Content API. Then, the generator requests the content, injects it in templates defined by the developer and generates a bunch of HTML files.

https://gohugo.io/ written in go, support md https://hexo.io/ written in node

Hexo's

I'm currently using Hexo, I write articles in markdown, commit them to a git repository and push them to Github. I then have a Github Action to bundle the static website and publish it on Github Pages, so I get free hosting 👌

There are also many alternatives for selecting Static-Side Generating blog framework such as Hexo, Gatsby, Next.js (more details here). We will pick Hexo as our framework because it is a fast, simple & powerful blog framework.

Some alternatives I'm considering learning instead of Gatsby are Jeckyll or Hexo.

Download and Install WP2Static Plugin

> It is not actually that hard to run Wordpress securely. Stick to supported plugins and themes, and install security patches quickly when they are released.

Depending on your site's functionality, it may also be possible to run a static WP site:

* https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/

* https://wp2static.com

You do all your regular updates via the CMS, but, instead of putting the dynamic site on the public Internet, you generate static files and point your public web server's HTML rootdir at those.

Also, for a bit more complex although richer in features workflow, you might try Wordpress with the Block Editor (or any page builder like Elementor) and the [WP2Static](https://github.com/WP2Static/wp2static) plugin, which allows you to turn a Wordpress site into a static one!

The closest "free" option I can think of is Oracle Cloud, but /r/oraclecloud shows plenty of horror stories in registration and maintaining an instance. If you don't actually need interactive features, WP2Static on your local instance to be deployed to Cloudflare Pages might work.

> Most WP sites should be static sites.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/

https://wp2static.com

Depending on the site, ask yourself "How dynamic does it actually have to be?". Perhaps using the GUI to update the content, and then creating static files and serving those may be an option:

* https://wp2static.com

You could also use WordPress as a SSG with the WP2Static plugin — https://github.com/WP2Static/wp2static/

What is wrong with using Wordpress? I believe now one can get Wordpress to have 'static site' capabilities these days [0]

[0] https://wp2static.com/