I admit, the title of this article can't seem more clickbait, but give me a chance and keep reading; Although it may seem incredible to you, it is scrupulously true.
Not only will you be able to host your website completely free, but you will also use the latest trends in website development.
Furthermore, as you will see below, thanks to the plugin Simply Static we will make it very easy.
Although doing so will be easy, there are several concepts and topics that I want to explain, so I will leave you the index below so that you can go to the specific part of the article that you want, although if you see that it sounds like Chinese to you, I recommend that you read it from the beginning. calmly.
Table of Contents
Static Websites
The creation of Static Websites is not something new for me, in fact, here you can see how to make a static website with a tool called Hugo.
But in this article we are going to go further, in fact we are going to go much further 😉
Instead of using a new tool to make our website static, we are going to use WordPress and using a plugin we will automatically convert it into a static website.
Why would we want to convert our website into a static website?
Benefits of Converting our website into a Static Website
Speed
One of the big problems that WordPress has is that for it to work well it requires very good web hosting. By the way, for me, the best Hosting in the world is Kinsta 😛
Why do you need good hosting? WordPress is a dynamic content manager, so each article or page you create does not have its real HTML page, but is generated dynamically every time a user visits the website.
The information for each article on the website is in a database (MySQL). When the visitor enters the URL, the HTML of the page is generated in real time.
And this consumes time and the worse the hosting is, the more time it consumes.
Security
One of the biggest challenges of maintaining a WordPress website is keeping it secure.
If you are familiar with WordPress you will know that you have to continually update WordPress, the template and of course the plugins.
If you don't regularly update WordPress, security holes open up that hackers can take advantage of. It is the ugliest part of WordPress and any other tool that uses dynamic programming languages.
What's so good about turning the website static? Your website will not have PHP files, only flat HTML files, so you radically reduce the chances of being hacked.
Cost
Regarding the cost, there is great confusion among people.
Let me tell you something directly and sincerely:
You have to pay for good hosting.
Point.
There's no more.
Listen to me.
There's no more.
I have used (and use) many web hosting and there are several things I can tell you:
- When a hosting says «Unlimited", he is lying.
- Cheap hosting does not work well on large websites, unless you maintain the infrastructure yourself.
- Shared hosting is the devil.
I hope I haven't been too harsh, but in my years of experience I can tell you that the world of web hosting is that tough.
You might want to ask me, But, Oscar, if cheap hosting is bad, how are you recommending a free option as the title of this post says?
Hosting for dynamic websites is expensive because there are many 'pieces' that have an expensive cost:
- Fast databases
- Fast and secure PHP hosting
- CDN
- Etc ...
On the other hand, when you convert your website to static there is none of that, you don't need databases, php, or anything. You only need hosting to upload static files and this, my friend, is cheap. So cheap that many professional companies give it away for free.
I will talk about this later, but there are good and cheap hostings that allow you to host your website for free if it is a static website, among the hostings that allow you to host static websites for free are Kinsta, netlify, Github and many more.
If you make the static website with Simply Static you can add another benefit to all the benefits that I just mentioned
Integrated
If you don't use WordPress to make your website static, you will encounter a problem:
Design
If you know WordPress you will know that there are countless templates made and what is better, there are visual builders like Elementor o DIVI.
When using Simply Static to convert your website into a static site, you respect the design you have made. This functionality is simply magic. Since you get the best of both worlds.
Disadvantages
Not valid for dynamic websites
If you have a store made with WooCommerce or a membership or subscription it will not work for you.
This method is perfect for company websites and blogs but it does not work for dynamic websites.
As you will see later, you can add a search engine, comments and forms to your website.
But not online stores.
Requires a little more configuration
As you will see in this tutorial, it is not difficult but it requires a little more configuration than when we make a normal WordPress website.
Of course, once configured you will see that everything works on autopilot.
WordPress as Headless
Using WordPress as an internal tool and another tool to show the final result of the website is called Headless.
You may be wondering, well okay, the website “that people see” is static but I need to host a WordPress to be able to make it static.
And you are right, but here comes the best part, since WordPress you only need it for yourself, you can host it locally or you can host it on a cheap web hosting since it is only for your personal use.
Host WordPress Locally
If you host your website on your computer locally, you have the problem that You can only add content from the computer that has WordPress installed.
Also, unless you are a very organized person, I do not recommend doing it since Any failure on your computer will make you waste a lot of time.
Making backups is always essential but when working locally it is even more so, since any problem on your local computer will cause you to lose your WordPress.
Remember, backups and a lot of order if you host it locally.
Host WordPress on cheap hosting
As I mentioned above, cheap hosting is the main cause of a slow website but if you only use it to add or modify content it can be a good option.
Your visitors will enjoy a fast website and only you will “suffer” the WordPress of a shared hosting.
And if you want the best of both worlds and your pocket allows it, I recommend using a good hosting for your static website and also for your WordPress installation.
Create a Static Website with WordPress and Simply Static
We have already seen the advantages of creating a static website with WordPress, now we are going to see how we can do it.
In this tutorial we are going to use the Simply Static plugin.
Simply Static has two versions:
Simple Static in its Free version
The free version is fully functional but only allows you to download the static website to your computer. That is to say, It does not allow you to directly upload the static website to the server.
If you use the free version, you would have to upload the static website to the server manually.
If you are going to make a website with few updates, it may be a good option. But if what you want is to create a blog or a website that you are going to update a lot, I recommend that you continue reading and see everything that the paid version does.
Installing the free version is as easy as entering the WordPress administration area –> Plugins –> Add new plugin and in the search engine writing simply static:
Once installed and activated, a new menu will appear on the side of WordPress with the option Simply Static –> Generate Static Files:
When the export is finished you will see a link with the text Haz click here to download.
When you click, you will download a compressed file with your static website.
If you open the website locally you can see that you have your website with the same design as the original WordPress website.
[yellowbox]If you are viewing the website from your own computer you have to install a local server so that it looks good. If you don't do it, it won't look good, but don't worry, when you upload it to a server it will look perfect[/cajaamarilla]
Simply Static Premium version
The paid version of Simply Static has very interesting options such as:
- Configure a search engine on your static website
- Add comments
- Set up forms
- Minify the code
But without a doubt, the most interesting thing about the paid version is that you can upload the static website directly to your server. At the time of writing this article it had integration with the following Hostings:
- GitHub
- AWS S3
- Tiiny.host
- Bunny CDN
- Simply CDN
- Digital Ocean Spaces
- SFTP
The good thing is that simply with SFTP you can upload it to almost any server and Github allows you to configure it with many others such as Kinsta or Netlify.
In my test I am going to do it with KinstaAs I said, many accommodations have integration with Github, so even if it does not appear on the list you can configure it through Github.
Deploy your Static Website on Kinsta
The process we are going to follow is the following:
- Upload our static website on Github
- Connect Kinsta with Github to host our website on Kinsta
- Every time we add new content to the web, it is uploaded to Github, Github notifies Kinsta to refresh the content.
Upload Our Static Website to GitHub
Create an account in GitHub It's free. Once the account is created we have to create a token to be able to connect Simply Static with GitHub.
To create it, we have to go to Settings –> Developer Settings –> Personal Access Tokens.
Here you have the necessary permissions:
Now we have all the data we need to configure the Simply Static premium plugin.
Inside Deploy –> Deployment Method: Github
With the following options configured:
Obviously, you have to change the email and the repository for your data 😉
To check that everything is working well, we click on the purple 'Generate Static Files' button and if everything has gone well, our static website will be uploaded to GitHub.
And in our GitHub repository we will have to see something similar to this:
Deploy the Static Web in Kinsta
Kinsta allows you to host up to 100 static sites for free.
You just have to create one free account on MyKinsta.
Within MyKinsta, we go to the section Static Sites and click on Add Site
If we do not have Kinsta connected to our GiHub account, we connect it and if we already have it connected, we select the static web repository that we have in GiHub:
If every time we add changes to the website we want it to be displayed automatically, we mark Automatic deployment in Commit and we click continue.
As the website is static, on this screen we do not have to touch anything, we click on Create Site.
We wait a few minutes and if everything has gone well we will have our brand new static website ready 🙂
Final Considerations
- The example website is a simple website but would work just as well with complex Elementor or DIVI designs.
- If you have WordPress on the internet, I recommend that you put it under a password so that it is not indexed.
- Always make backup copies. It is easy to 'lose' WordPress when what is used is the static website
I hope you liked it and found it useful.