Frequently asked questions

Normally when users visit your site, WordPress dynamically generates the requested page on the fly, every time again. Depending on the WordPress theme and plugins installed, as well as the server hosting WordPress, this can be a very intensive process.

Staatic acts as a user visiting all of the pages of your WordPress site and saving them as static (ready to be served) HTML files. These files can be hosted anywhere, including on CDNs (content delivery network) and multiple edge locations, causing a huge boost in your site’s performance.

Note that while existing WordPress caching plugins can improve WordPress performance as well, Staatic takes it a step further by making WordPress completely obsolete from the user’s perspective. This opens a world of new possibilities to further improve performance, as well as availability and security.

WordPress itself is pretty secure, as long as best practices are followed. Best practices include installing only safe plugins and themes, keeping WordPress (as well as server software) up to date and using security plugins to monitor your site.

Staatic completely removes WordPress from the process of serving pages to your users. All content of your site is pregenerated and can be passed on to your users immediately, greatly reducing the attack surface. In addition this makes it possible to host your site anywhere, including on CDNs (Content Delivery Network) and multiple edge locations, since there is no server side processing involved.

The premium edition of Staatic comes with many additional features as well as form and search integration. Additionally we provide extensive technical support whenever you need it. For a complete list of features, have a look at the features overview.

No. At least, it should not. If the static version of your site does differ, it is probably because of invalid HTML in your original WordPress site, which could not be converted correctly. In that case you can verify the validity of your HTML using a validator service like W3C Markup Validation Service.

Another reason could be a missing stylesheet/javascript that Staatic was unable to detect during the crawling phase. You could check if there are any failed network requests on your static site using the developer toolbar within your browser. If a file is missing (returning a 404 not found), you can manually add it’s location to Additional URLs within the plugin’s Build settings.

Static sites have some limitations that dynamic sites do not have, causing specific functionality that requires a backend able to process requests dynamically to fail. For example, form submission handling and search will not work out of the box. For most cases there are solutions or alternatives available though.

Staatic aims to provide solutions for most common limitations. Where we are unable to provide a solution directly, usually alternatives exist. If you are unsure whether Staatic will work for your specific case, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us.