Static vs. Dynamic

It’s all a personal preference. If you find the performance of your web server to be too slow for your clients, then you should look into all the tweaks you can do to increase performance. Moving to static pages is one way to cut load times.

However, the transition costs may (or may not) be significant as you try to move the content that is loaded dynamically in WordPress to a more permanent framework in which the pages are “baked” (as per the article to which you linked) before they are published to the web.

There is a reason some people moved away from static publishing, and not just because it was “bleeding edge” technology. It removes a lot of the hassle from the web administrator’s responsiblities, and it gives your site more of a living, breathing feel rather than the older, more dull static environments of the past.

It’s all personal preference. If you want static pages, look into it and see what you need to do to make that happen. If you prefer dynamic loading and the various other advantages to using WordPress, stick with that. I certainly prefer WordPress to the alternatives.

One feature ONLY available via dynamic (OK, I can think of a middle way to do it via AJAX and whatnot, but that’s not the point) is if you want comments, etc on your site, you pretty much have to go dynamic.

There’s no denying that all things being equal a static site is less hassle, better performance for serving up the same pages. fewer moving parts always trump even a well designed machine. and if that suits your needs, go with it.

and the appearance is backend agnostic, just doens’t matter whether it’s static or dynamic to have a good design.

the publish metaphor, movable type et al, is appealing if you don’t show comments, or other evolving/frequently changing info (including RSS feeds).

there is a price to publishing, though. if you have 10,000 pages then generating and uploading those is an issue.

so frequency of updates is another consideration.

lots of decent static sites built entirely with dreamweaver templates, too. and you’d never know it.

no one here evangelizes WP as the only solution, it’s a tool, choose the one that’s best for you. that said, WP is fairly cool ;-p

When you get digged often, static is very tempting.

I’ve had similar issues with sites like this. Here’s how I solved it.

First, I put everything aside.

Next, I asked myself what I wanted. Did I want the ease of dynamic content, and all that came with it, or did it matter if I had to chop up a ton of files, and in the end have straight static content?

Next, I looked at how often the content was updated. My answer was frequently.

I decided that I really needed the dynamic content, and features only it can provide.

So, that left the next part. The sites in question in each case were taxing the host. Problem: The site had outgrown the host.

Finally the decision. Static contant with the current host, or find one that could support the load.

I decided in each case to get a better host. It didn’t come for $5, but the additional cost paid for itself. If you’ve really got the traffic to warrant looking at this (dynamic vs static), most likely you can offset the additional expense in some form or fashion.

Summary: Figure out what you want in your site, then go from there. If it means changing hosts, and even getting a dedicated box, go for it.

And sometimes there’s the best of both worlds:

https://dev.wp-plugins.org/wiki/WP-Cache

Yeah, wp-cache works good on some of my sites, but I use wp-polls and it doesn’t really work with the polls. I could probably do a workaround on the site I have polls on, but without much of a worry about speed, I don’t bother. It just generates a new page every 30 minutes or whatever you set it up as.

I use the internal caching of WP2 myself. It’s not as hard core as WP-Cache, but it cuts the queries per page in more than 1/2 and won’t break any plugin as it’s just caching database queries rather than whole pages.