WordPress is Dead. Long Live WordPress.
I don't typically do much WordPress anymore. I eat, sleep, breathe and code line of business web applications that scale in Azure and depend on multiple storage mechanisms, complete with APIs that may or may not have a mobile strategy. WP (and PHP) are not really the best tools for that anymore. From time to time though, I do jump back into the WP world to assist on projects and each time I'm reminded why it's becoming more of a specialized solution platform than the user-friendly Hello, World blog post generator it became famous for.
And it's pretty slow. Yes, you can host on specialized hosts to boost your performance and pay for that but when did you last see a free web host getting you this on your site:
Performance is one of the reasons JAMstacks have become so popular. While WP was racking up millions of free themes, security woes and starting to get commerce integrations, node.js was racking up a following. Fast forward a couple of years and that ecosystem has exploded. Building web sites has become sophisticated but in a different way. The sophistication also has a lot of continuous integration magic - still possible with WP, but the brave new world is more concerned with other things.
And serving static files is still King. Caching mechanisms, from front-end loaders to proxies, to browser caches, to CDNs; all these exist to try and "staticfy" (sic) parts of your web site. It's a massive overhead compared to the amount of interactivity most sites actually get. Ever take a tank to a knife fight?
Enter the world of headless CMS. What if you could get the blazing performance of static but with some kind of user-agency-friendly content management system? That question has been bouncing around for a couple of years and taking some time to revisit that world, I am impressed by how it has matured. Oh, and then there's security. All things being equal, a static site has a LOT fewer attack vectors.
Taking the same site server off WordPress and exporting it to markdown and serving it off a free host at Netlify with a little bit of magic in between and the result is:
I'll leave it to you to guess which result is WordPress powered and which one just draws content from WordPress. Talk about protecting your marketing and development spend. How many sites spend a fair bit getting users to their site only to let them down with some pretty dismal performance?