Static WordPress Hosting

What is static WordPress site?

Before getting into static WordPress hosting (which also could be headless WordPress hosting), let’s look into what is a static WordPress site.

A static website is one that has web pages with fixed content and hence displays the same information to all your visitors. They are often HTML documents stored as files in the file system and made available by the web server over HTTP.

A simple example of a static website is your homepage that tells your visitors about your business offerings. 

Sites generated using WordPress are dynamic. It generates web pages on the fly which is resource and time-consuming, and that’s the main reason for performance issues in WordPress.

Static WordPress site is a replica of a WordPress site that is delivered as pre-rendered HTML files and pages, completely disconnected from the servers.

What are the advantages of a static WordPress site?

There are some very important advantages of a static website

• Security. In the dynamic website, every layer from Apache server to the MySQL database, to every plugin installed on the site is potentially vulnerable. With a static site, there is nothing to breach.

• Speed. Static sites are generally faster because every page is prerendered. There are no underlying processing servers, no database queries, and no PHP processing. Also, every page of a static site can be served up through a CDN.  But in the case of dynamic sites, only the static assets like images, CSS, and JS can be served through CDN

• Scalability. Static sites scale effortlessly. Supporting a dynamic high-traffic site is costly and can be complicated. And even when you do that successfully, a spike in traffic can seriously slow down a site and cause issues. 

• Maintenance. With a static site, there’s no need for regular maintenance, like upgrades, security tweaks, etc

How do I make my WordPress site static?

There are two ways to do that :

• You can create a headless WordPress website. In headless wordpress front-end and backend are decoupled. That means the WP admin is used mainly  for content management. The front end gets the content from the WP REST API or WPGraphQL.
• You can build your site in WordPress as usual (using theme, plugins, etc) and then use a suitable platform in generating a static version of your site. 

Static WordPress Hosting Providers

I am mentioning here some of the very well-established static or headless WordPress hosting providers. 

HardyPress

HardyPress is one of the cheapest static WordPress Hosting.

It hosts your WordPress installation securely and uses it as a static WordPress site generator, so you can create a static site that we can serve separately from your WordPress installation. 

The front-end of the website is never served by WordPress. When you are ready to publish your content, HardyPress makes a completely static copy of the website and serves it through the CDN.

Hosting

Its cheapest hosting plan is only €5/month for a single website and 500MB of storage. It’s mainly for personal websites.

Features 

• WordPress shutdown – Front-end is served through CDN
• Serverless technology
• Global CDN
• Free HTTPS (SSL certificate)
• Staging environment
• Continue using Contact Form 7 and site search, plus any back end plugins
• No updates required
• One year backups
• No lock-in

HardyPress is headless as it keeps the back-end on its own server, but it isn’t meant to be used for multichannel publishing. You can get access to the REST API if you have at least the €80/month VPS plan.

WP Engine

WP Engine is a well-known WordPress hosting platform, already serving over a million websites. It’s also one of the static WordPress hosting platforms.

Hosting

WP Engine has a hosting solution for a variety of WordPress setups, including headless WordPress.

For a headless hosting solution, you need to talk to their sales team. It is provided as a custom solution

Features

WP Engine can help you troubleshoot REST API issues and standard WordPress functionality problems, along with providing fast and reliable hosting services.

WP Engine Atlas is an enterprise-grade “Node” hosting platform using which you can create and host headless WordPress sites. Using this framework, the admin gets to control how and where the content of your website is rendered.

The way things are done using PHP in a monolithic environment, Node is utilized in a headless WordPress website.

Shifter

Shifter is a feature-rich modern static WordPress hosting platform that allows you to create either a static or headless WordPress site. 

Hosting

It has two sets of plans: Shifter Static for generating static HTML WordPress sites, and Shifter Headless, for headless WordPress. 

Features 

• Dev friendly features like – Shifter API, PHP Error Reporting, Site usage, and statistics, Magic Link Logins
• Automated Scaling
• Shifter Media CDN, CDN caching
• Site-wide password protection
• Maintenance-free, built-in security
• Teams & members for easy collaboration 
• IPv6 Ready
• Outgoing webhooks
• Redis database caching
• Automated Backups
• Scheduled Deploys

Strattic

Strattic is an all-in-one static site generation and hosting platform that does instant WordPress optimization by converting it to a static architecture. 

With Strattic, content managers and marketers can continue to manage content in WordPress as usual, while developers get to work with a fully headless website.

Strattic focuses especially on creating static sites, but it does support headless WordPress with its serverless architecture.

Hosting

Pricing starts at $45/month for solo and $250/month for the Business plan. If you purchase annually you get two free months. 

There’s also a custom Enterprise & Agency plan in case you want to go for it.

Features

• Heavy focus on security with DDoS protection and a locked-down admin
• Maintenance-free WordPress protection – no rush to run updates.
• Isolated runtime environment – WP site is in a secure containerized environment that is protected from the web and spins down when not in use.
• Pre-rendered for faster content.
• Global CDN with 225 locations.
• Incremental builds – Quick and Selective Publish options, so you can quickly publish your most recent content updates.
• High concurrency build process – faster static site build process.
• Preview/staging static site – an additional static site to preview any new features or changes before deploying to your live production site.
• Add team members and manage their Strattic access and publishing permissions.
• WordPress search is automatically replaced with Algolia search for static-friendly, high-quality search results.
• Yoast SEO and RankMath support
• Multilingual support with WPML & Polylang
• Content Security Policies (CSP) – CSPs help protect your site from attacks like data injection attacks.
• SFTP access – SFTP access to your WordPress site for any changes you need to make.
• HTTP/2 & Gzip compliant
• Password-protected pages
• Scheduled posts –  content appears on your static site at the right time.
• Free SSL certificate
• CoSchedule support – for sharing and scheduling marketing content.
• Comeet Support – very popular applicant tracking service for your recruitment needs.
• Daily backups and on-demand backups
• Effortless performance
• S3 Redundancy and Fallback – experience no downtime.
• 24-hour Award-Winning Support

You can go for a free trial which gives you one website on a Strattic domain.

Pagely

Pagely claims to provide Managed WordPress hosting solutions for a variety of use cases and headless WordPress hosting is one of them.

The headless WordPress is optimized for Graphql and REST APIs.

Pagely doesn’t limit the front-end framework you use. So you can build the front-end of your headless WordPress site in Gatsby, React, Vue, or in any other available framework.

Hosting

Pagely’s business class hosting starts at $499 per month and the smaller plan for individual bloggers and website owners start with $199 per month

Features 

• PRESSDNS™ – Route 53 Latency reduced DNS
• PRESSCACHE™ – Faster sites are better sites
• PRESSCDN™ – Global CDN for WordPress
• PRESSARMOR™ – Advanced Network Security
• PRESSTHUMB™ – Dynamic Image Optimization
• PRESSFORMANCE™ – Performance and Security Analytics
• Powered By Amazon (Aws)
• Expert Support – Ticket & Live Chat
• Managed WP Upgrades – Managed Core/Plugin Updates
• Automatic Backups To S3 – 14 Day Retention
• Redis Cache Engine – Cache All The Objs
• Http/2 + Php7.X – Faster Is Better
• Staging + Sync – Work Smarter
• Ssl Management – 3rd Party Or Let’s Encrypt
• Wp-Cli, ssh + Db Access 
• Version Control – Git/Svn You Decide

NorthStack

NorthStack is managed application hosting platform based on a modern serverless AWS stack, where you can deploy WordPress, headless WordPress, Node, or static sites with ease.

Every site Elastically auto-scales and you only pay for what you use.

Its a service by Pagely

Hosting

It’s currently in Beta. So you can join it to get some free usage credit. 

Features

• Elastic Autoscaling – Flexible, scalable infrastructure
• A pay-as-you-go plan – no charge you for unused resources (and no set minimums)
• Compatible with both React and Vue
• Support for static WordPress as well as general headless installation
• 100% AWS Stack
• Flexible Version Control
• SSL
• Automated S3 Backups
• Http/2 + Php7.X + Node8.X
• Wp_Cli/Db Access
• Managed Plugin/Core Updates
• Managed Devops (optional)

If you’re just experimenting with your product idea rather than launching an important product, you should give it a try.