Documentation / Setting up Staatic / Requirements

Requirements

Introduction

Staatic is designed in such a way that it will work well in most environments. Whether you are running it on a low-end server, or whether you have a large site with many posts and pages, it should work fine either way.

Since the resulting static site consist only of basic HTML files and assets like images, pretty much any web server will be able to serve it and your visitors will always experience the highest performance possible.

Note: these instructions apply to the manual installation of Staatic. If you have a Staatic Cloud subscription, the Staatic Premium plugin is already preinstalled on your managed WordPress instance.

Minimum system requirements

The following system requirements need to be met in order to use Staatic.

If you are unsure whether your environment matches these requirements, please consult with your hosting provider.

Staatic has been tested on various Linux distributions as well as on Windows.

WordPress 5.0+

Staatic requires WordPress 5.0 or greater.

PHP 7.1+

Staatic requires PHP 7.1 or greater.

Note: We recommend PHP 8.1+ from a security perspective. Older PHP versions are no longer actively supported, nor do they receive security updates. See the supported versions table on PHP.net for more information.

The following PHP extensions need to be enabled (this is usually the case):

  1. Mbstring PHP Extension
  2. Json PHP Extension
  3. XML PHP Extension
  4. Zip PHP Extension

Some OS distributions may require you to manually install some of the required PHP extensions.

When using Ubuntu, the following command can be run to install all required extensions:

sudo apt update &&
sudo apt install php-mbstring php-json php-xml php-zip

Limitations

Static sites provide great benefits over regular WordPress sites, however also come with some limitations.

In case you are relying on plugins that require dynamic (server-side) processing to operate, you will need to replace such plugins with alternatives that are compatible with static sites (e.g. providing dynamic interaction using client-side scripting).

Plugins requiring dynamic processing are for example related to search, form handling, commenting/discussion and e-commerce.

Note: For search and form handling Staatic Premium provides ready to use integrations to enable these functionalities.

Commenting

Native WordPress comments as well as forum and discussion plugins require an active database connection which is unavailable on static sites. Some alternatives include Commento, Disqus and Hyvor Talk.

eCommerce

At the moment Staatic does not support WooCommerce functionality. There are many alternative solutions compatible with static sites though, including Snipcart, Ecwid and Shopify.

Other functionality

An easy way to find out if your site is compatible with Staatic would be to start a free 14-day Staatic Cloud trial and import a copy of your site (e.g. using the Duplicator WordPress plugin). You will then be able to publish the static version of your site to a temporary location hosted by Staatic and can verify if everything works as expected. This will not affect your existing site in any way.

If you need help choosing the right alternatives or are encountering any issues, we would be happy to assist.