We’ll give some recommendations for designing your ideal WordPress to static hosting setup.
The first thing to decide is whether to host your WordPress site locally, on the internet using your existing hosting or choosing an all-in-one static site generation and hosting platform like Strattic. We’re talking about your WordPress development site here. As opposed to the resulting static site, which you’ll likely host online. Of course, it’s up to you to find the ideal setup, you may even use WP2Static for generating websites for offline use or behind a company or school’s intranet. WP2Static aims to provide as much flexibility to you, while keeping the plugin optimized for the core use cases.
Local or remote WordPress development server?
How to decide what’s right for me
You should go local when you…
- are the only one developing the site
- don’t want to pay for hosting
- want to use the full power of your personal computer
- are paranoid about security
You should host online when you…
- work with others to develop the site
- need to give your client access to the WP dashboard
- have external services adding content to your site
- are prepared to secure your dev site from the public/bots
You should choose Strattic if you…
- want an hassle-free all-in-one static conversion and web hosting solution
- don’t want to worry about setting you your own security
- want to leverage a global network of CDNs so your site is available everywhere
- want maintenance-free WordPress protection
- want daily backups and on-demand backups
- need a free SSL certificate
- want to have native support for contact forms including Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms and Elementor forms
- want native 404 support
- live 24 hour customer support chat with WordPress experts
- faster publishing times
- multiple publishing environments (preview and live)
Migrating an existing live site to a development server
Whether you’ll choose a local or online development server, you’ll need to follow a similar process before you can start publishing statically. These steps are described below.
- Setup a new development server
- Clone your live site to the development server
- Adjust WordPress URLs to the new server’s
Setting up a new development server
Be sure to check the System Requirements for WP2Static when setting up your new development server. We’ll give examples or recommended solutions for both local and online WordPress development servers. If you need more help deciding what’s right for you, please Contact Us and describe your use case for more recommendations.
Does it work with tool X, Y or Z?
Answer: Probably! Try it out and ask on the forum if you have issues. If there are common issues/workarounds for certain local dev environments/remote hosting providers, that’s the best place to search/ask.
Additionally, Strattic also maintains a static-friendly directory of plugins and tools and you can use their live chat to ask for a compatibility review of your website.
Cloning your current live site to your new development server
With many guides already written and recorded for cloning a WordPress site, we’ll just share you a few links for now, so we can continue to build the essential documentation for WP2Static.
- How to Clone a WordPress Site in 7 Easy Steps
- How to clone your WordPress site
- Migrating WordPress via the Command Line
- Migrate to Strattic using Migrate Guru
Correcting your new WordPress site’s URLs
If your migration process didn’t include an option to update WordPress’s URLs to the new site’s, you’ll need to do that at this point. Again, we reference an external guide to help you with this.