Description

Simply Static is a static site generator that converts your existing WordPress website to a static website that you can host on your server, a static hosting provider, or a CDN.

It drastically improves the performance of your website and minimizes security risks as it removes the connection between your traditional server and your static website.

Simply Static can also be used by local development tools like LocalWP or Lando to develop your website offline and push the static site online.

This reduces your hosting costs to zero (depending on your requirements and the used service/provider).

Performance

Converting your website to a static website can drastically improve your performance. Simply Static eliminates all requests to your database and by that reducing the first time to byte.

This is especially impactful for websites that use long pages with a lot of animations, graphs, and other load-heavy tools like sliders.

Sécurité

Removing the connection to your database and traditional server reduces the risk of getting hacked.

This reduces the stress to keep your WordPress website up to date and keeps your data secure (locally or in a protected environment).

Reduce hosting costs

Using Simply Static to deploy your website to one of the static hosting providers, a CDN or an S3 bucket reduces the amount of money required for reliable web hosting.

With the right setup, you can even host your website completely for free (Cloudflare Pages and GitHub Pages for example).

Local development

Develop your site locally and only push the static exported website on a server. To ensure everything works as expected I created a list of development tools that are completely supported:

I highly recommend not to use another tool for local development if you are not a programmer as in most cases manual package installation is required.

Simply Static Pro

The pro version of Simply Static enhances the plugin with various features.

GitHub Integration

With the GitHub integration, you can completely automate your entire development process.

The only thing you need is a GitHub account, no knowledge of Git or GitHub itself is required, as Simply Static Pro handles the entire process for you and keeps your repository up to date.

This allows deploying your static website to:

GitHub Pages
Cloudflare Pages
Netlify
Vercel
Amazon S3
Digital Ocean Spaces
BunnyCDN (and other CDN providers)
SFTP to your server

Builds and Single Exports

Create builds to export only a subset of pages/posts. You can assign a build to every custom post type in your WordPress admin area and export them.

Never sit back and watch a full static export running, instead run a complete export once and then use builds to export the changes as fast as possible.

You can also export single pages/posts after changed something.

Forms

Simply Static Pro supports Contact Form 7 and Gravity Forms to use on your static website.

You can decide if you want to use an external service like Zapier and IFTTT or if your original WordPress website should handle the submission and send you an e-mail with all the details.

Search

Use a fully static search solution that does not rely on any Third-Party-Providers. It uses Fuse.js and creates an index of your whole website as a JSON file.

The search supports autosuggestion and fuzzy logic and is by default way more convenient than your default WordPress search.

Comments

Enable comments on your static website without the requirement of Third-Party-Providers. Use your original WordPress website to process the comment.

After a comment was submitted, Simply Static automatically exports a new static version of the post. You don’t have to do anything.

Multilingual

Use WPML, Polylang or TranslatePress and run static exports per language or all at once.

Simply Static Pro also supports configuring settings per language, using the available language switchers and more to export a your multilingual website as easy as possible.

Get the Pro version

You can get the pro version here.

Tutorials

I publish new tutorials on how to work with Simply Static and other tools on my blog.

You can check the current tutorials here

Captures d’écran

Generate
Settings
Diagnostics

Installation

Connectez-vous à votre site WordPress.
On the left menu, hover over Plugins and then click on Add New.
In the Search Plugins box, type in « Simply Static » and press the Enter key.
You will see a list of search results that should include the Simply Static plugin. Click on the Install Now button to install the plugin.
After installing the plugin you will be prompted to activate it. Click on the Activate Plugin link.
The Simply Static plugin is now installed and can be found on the left menu.

Upload the entire simply-static folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
Activez l’extension par l’intermédiaire du menu « Extensions » de WordPress.

FAQ

What does Simply Static do?

Simply Static generates static (HTML) copies of your WordPress pages. It works a bit like a web crawler, starting at the main page of your website and looking for links to other pages to create static copies of. It also includes any images, CSS & JS files, and any other files that it can find a link to.

As Simply Static is creating the static pages, it will automatically replace the URLs for the WordPress installation with either (a) absolute URLs, at a domain of your choice or (b) relative URLs, so you can host the static files on any domain or (c) URLs constructed for offline use, so you can browse the site locally on your computer.

Who should use Simply Static?

Pretty much everyone, besides e-commerce or membership sites. They require a serious amount of interaction and user accounts, which are not available on a static website.

Are there any limitations?

You can not use plugins that require a login as there is no account system on a static website. This applies to e-commerce (like WooCommerce) or membership sites.

Also, a website that relies heavily on ajax to update content in real-time is not the best project for Simply Static as a serious amount of custom development would be required.

How do I set up Simply Static?

Let’s assume you presently have WordPress hosting a site at www.example.com, and that’s where you’d like to have your static site instead. Your first task is going to be to move your WordPress installation to a subdomain, such as wordpress.example.com. Once that is complete, you’ll set up www.example.com to receive your static files.

If www.example.com is on the same server as your WordPress installation, you can have Simply Static copy the static files to the directory that www.example.com is serving files from. If www.example.com is on a different server, you can download a zip of your static files and then upload them to www.example.com.

Will this plugin interfere with other plugins?

No, Simply Static will not interfere with other plugins. Simply Static works well alongside other plugins, such as plugins to improve your site’s SEO.

Simply Static creates a static copy of your website, which is just a collection of files: HTML, CSS, JS, images, etc. Any functionality that requires PHP code will not work with that static copy. That includes, but is not limited to: blog post comments, contact forms, forums, membership areas, and eCommerce.

Note that you can achieve much of this functionality by using plugins that interact with third-party services or Simply Static Pro.

How is Simply Static different from cache plugins?

Cache plugins — such as W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache — make your existing WordPress site faster by caching pages as they’re visited. This makes your site much faster but still leaves your WordPress installation accessible to the outside world. Unless you keep on top of updates, your WordPress installation can become vulnerable to hackers due to security vulnerabilities that are found over time.

Simply Static creates a static copy of your WordPress site that is intended to be used completely separately from your WordPress installation. Your WordPress installation lives on one server and your static site is served on a different server. Or, they’re both on the same server, but your WordPress installation is restricted to only allow access from certain IP addresses or with an additional username/password requirement. Your static site is just a collection of static files with no server-side code or database — nothing for hackers to hack — while your WordPress installation remains safe and secure.

Avis

lukearrigoni 30 août 2022

This plugin combined with Github Actions + S3 allow me to host a fully powered site like wordpress at scale without incurring server costs. This plugin is worth it's weight in gold. Pays for itself the first month you use it.

Herbert 12 août 2022

I have been using the pro version of this plugin for some time now. It has evolved in a short time to an excellent plugin. Support from Patrick is always great. Thanks!

Guan 8 août 2022

Very nice, but there are some bugs: (1) The relative links do not work well in "Save for offline use" mode. (2) Is the Chinese character encoding type GBK or UTF8 in media file name? It does not work well for media file with Chinese file name.

Gravel 1 juin 2022

Doesn't reply to support request in 4 months

Steven 5 mai 2022

I tried different export settings with the same export folder containing files that don't work. Open the index file and I get missing CSS and image. Folder structure is not what I expected which should contain standard sub folders like CSS, JS, and images. Switch to another similar plugin which does the job as I expected.

victoriasweb 4 mai 2022

I made an account just to review this after seeing all the good reviews. This plugin did not help at all. It seemed it only downloaded images and when I opened it I would only see missing images. When I logged out of my wp site and just pressed ctrl+s it downloaded the site perfectly! ... not sure why I even needed a plugin now.

Lire les 137 avis

Contributeurs & développeurs

« Simply Static » est un logiciel libre. Les personnes suivantes ont contribué à cette extension.

patrickposner

“Simply Static” a été traduit dans 8 locales. Remerciez l’équipe de traduction pour ses contributions.

Traduisez « Simply Static » dans votre langue.

Le développement vous intéresse ?

Parcourir le code, consulter le SVN dépôt, ou s’inscrire au journal de développement par RSS.

Journal

2.1.7.1

added exception handling for and tag extractions

2.1.7

improved Basic Auth handling allowing access for external APIs
parse content of script tags for URL replacements
improved tags with HTML5 tags for header, footer, section and figure
added style attributes to match_tags for a, div, section and more

2.1.6

adding and tags to extractor class
validating URLs in meta tags and update them

2.1.5.9

better decoding/encoding of URLs
added filter to modify default file extension
improved tag based extraction and removed catch all
added tags to extractor
increased default batch size
file path check improvements

2.1.5.8

added SSL to diagnostics
added filter for origin URL
increased general ping time
Windows support: replacing paths

2.1.5.7

http_request_args filter added for better performance with Basic Authentication
Windows compatibility fix for path conversion
reverted delete local directory for local dir exports (original merge request)
added filter for options getter
cleaned up WP Cron conditional

2.1.5.6

fixed non-valid HTML character error
UI improvement for running static exports
better http_request_args filter usage
ss_before_static_export action added
udpdated dependencies

2.1.5.5

cleaned up upgrade handler

2.1.5.4

reverted meta tags in extraction

2.1.5.3

webp support (source tag)
imagify support
action to trigger functions before static export
added meta tags to extractor for twitter cards and og tags
added filter to extend matched_tags
added action to run before static export
updated composer dependencies

2.1.5.2

introduced ss_finished_fetching_pages hook
introduced ss_finished_transferring_files_locally hook
fixed DB migration process performance issue
small CSS fixed for actions class

2.1.5.1

fixed migration on reset for new post_id db field

2.1.5

default export without cron
fixed generation of RSS feeds
better support for Yoast XML Sitemap in additional URLs
added option to change cron on/off
better URL validation
Windows support for slash URLs
actions for custom parsers (Blocksy theme compatibility)
enhanced matched_tags list (added srcset)
fixed upgrader class for DB migration
smaller CSS admin improvements
fixed Logo saving it without font requirements
better additional URL validation checks
removed send debug log mail
modified method visibility for fetch URLs task
added complete german translations

2.1.4.2

removed more commas for apply_filters to prevent execution error on some environments

2.1.4.1

removed comma for apply_filters to prevent execution error on some environments

2.1.4

new admin UI
check for WP cron
check for PHP XML extension
fallback if cron not available
CSS improvements

2.1.3

dispatch execution to cron for larger exports
fixed download URL for zip files
added support for custom head tags added in wp_head hook
parsing Rankmath sitemap if added to additional files
removing uploads folder from additional files setting

2.1.2.1, February 04, 2021

increased min PHP version to 7.2.5
wp_die() if lower PHP version is available
increases min version in diagnostics

2.1.2, February 04, 2021

added composer support
updated dependencies
more fail-safe bootup
Added sorting by status code
removed wp_mail_content_type filter
Fixed PHP notices for PHP 7.4 support
new composer package for simplehtmldom with Symfony Finder
improved doc blocks for models and tasks
auto exclude wp-JSON and wp-login.php from export
trailing slash / untrailingslash check pages

2.1.1, December 20, 2020

Fixed PHP Dom parser for later PHP versions
removed PHP faker due to end of development
little color modifications in admin areas
new plugin header and readme

2.1.0, May 12, 2017

New: Added the ability to set a user/pass for HTTP Basic Authentication

2.0.7, April 7, 2017

Fix: Non-Latin characters should no longer get converted to HTML entities (thanks xi80r6!)

2.0.6, April 4, 2017

Fix: Simply Static should now display a useful error message when using PHP <5.3

2.0.5, March 25, 2017

Fix: Fix for downloading 0-byte ZIPs (no Content-Length header)

2.0.4, March 25, 2017

Fix: Moving the default temp files directory back to within the plugin

2.0.3, March 16, 2017

Fix: Protocol-relative URLs now work again

2.0.2, January 18, 2017

Fix: Individual additional files are now properly included in static file generation
New: Added a diagnostics check to ensure that WordPress can make calls to itself

2.0.1, January 15, 2017

Fix: Removed Simply Static’s new error catching; was catching errors in other plugins

2.0.0, January 14, 2017

New: New logo/icon (thanks Hajo!)
New: Generate static files without having to stay on the Generate page (a job runs in the background)
New: Added the ability to specify URLs (or parts of URLs) to exclude from static file generation
New: Added a debugging mode with the ability to create/email a debug log
New: Added the ability to reset the plugin settings back to their defaults
New: Future versions will be able to downgrade to 2.0.0 (by overwriting files) without errors
New: Friendly error message if trying to use Simply Static with PHP < 5.3
New: Added support for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) HTML attributes
Fix: URLs containing the WP URL as a query param will rewrite the param with the new URL
Fix: Non-WP URLs in the Additional URLs section no longer cause Simply Static to hang
Fix: Zip creation will no longer throw errors when trying to process 0-byte files
Fix: Fixed an issue that could cause Simply Static to not remove all files when uninstalling
Fix: Local directories are now always chmod’d to 0755 so that they’re readable
Fix: Additional errors will be caught and displayed when generating static files

1.8.0, November 01, 2016

Fix: XML pages (e.g. /feed/) now generate index.xml files
Fix: XML pages now replace URLs properly
Fix: No longer adding extra backslashes () to directories with backslashes
Fix: No longer adding extra slashes (/) on user-specified additional directories

1.7.1, October 21, 2016

New: Auto-adding wp-content/uploads as a directory to include files from
New: Usage of the mbstring PHP extension is now optional
New: Added links for support, rating, and changelog in the footer
Fix: Added protection for cross-site request forgery (thanks pluginvulnerabilities.com!)
Fix: Now sanitizing all user inputs
Fix: Locking down generation of static files to users with proper permissions
Fix: The check for trailing slash redirection now works with relative URLs
Fix: « Cannot redeclare class PclZip » error should no longer occur

1.7.0, October 06, 2016

New: Destination URLs can now begin with // (in addition to HTTP:// & HTTPS://)
New: You can now use relative URLs (instead of absolute URLs) for the static site
New: Now able to export a static site for use offline

1.6.3, September 23, 2016

Fix: Eliminated a security vulnerability in relation to zip downloads (thanks Bas!)
Fix: SQL diagnostic checks now work with wildcard permission grants (thanks Jon!)

1.6.2, July 14, 2016

Fix: Made a slight modification to the prior fix

1.6.1, July 14, 2016

Fix: No more « Call to a member function find() on a non-object » error. Thanks, jwatkins0101!

1.6.0, June 07, 2016

Improvement: The DomDocument PHP extension is no longer required (replaced by SimpleHtmlDomParser)
Fix: No longer creating empty html attributes
Fix: No longer throwing the ‘Function name must be a string’ error in diagnostics. Thanks, Andrew-s!

1.5.1, June 05, 2016

Fix: Removing usage of composer, which was causing issues for certain PHP versions

1.5.0, June 02, 2016

Fix: The img srcset attribute now displays all urls (instead of only the last one)
Improvement: Less memory usage; less likely to exhaust allowed memory size
Improvement: Export log is now paginated / less likely to overwhelm your browser

1.4.1, April 28, 2016

Fix: Displaying exception messages instead of a generic error message

1.4.0, April 26, 2016

New: French translations. Thanks Pierre!
New: Diagnostics page displays pass/fail for everything needed for SS to run correctly
New: Auto-adding WP’s emoji url to Additional URLs
New: If a PHP error is encountered during processing it will be displayed
Improvement: If you can edit posts, you can generate a static site
Fix: Bad additional URLs could cause an infinite loop during static file generation
Fix: Unprocessable pages are now properly removed on subsequent static file runs

1.3.5, April 14, 2016

Fix: Simply Static was sometimes throwing an error on a certain WP action

1.3.4, April 14, 2016

Fix: URLs were not getting properly replaced

1.3.3, April 13, 2016

Fix Attempt #3 at fixing Simply Static’s upgrading process :'(

1.3.2, April 12, 2016

Fix Attempt #2 at fixing Simply Static’s upgrading process 🙁

1.3.1, April 12, 2016

Fix: Attempt #1 at fixing Simply Static’s upgrading process

1.3.0, April 9, 2016

New: Static archive creation handled via AJAX; PHP timeouts are a thing of the past
New: Activity Log – see what Simply Static is doing while it’s working

1.2.4, March 25, 2016

Fix: Link hashes (e.g. href=’#section-three’) will no longer be rewritten as full URLs

1.2.3, March 8, 2016

Fix: HTTP and HTTPS on the same domain are treated as the same site (no redirect files will be created)
New: Added support for the img tag’s srcset attribute, used for responsive images

1.2.2, January 26, 2016

Fix: Additional Files/Dirs now allows for usage of WP_PLUGIN_DIR and WP_CONTENT_DIR
Fix: Able to use WordPress’ Export feature with Simply Static installed

1.2.1, January 18, 2016

Fix: index.html was not getting added to the static archive

1.2.0, January 16, 2016

New: The export log now lists off all URLs, their http status codes, and the first page it was linked from
New: You can specify additional files/directories to include in your static archive
Fix: Switched libraries for ZIP generation, which should reduce extraction errors

1.1.3, December 7, 2015

Fix: Able to fetch protocol-less URLs, e.g. href=’//example.com/image.png’
Fix: Static files won’t be put in a subdirectory if your WP install is in a subdirectory
Fix: Able to download ZIP regardless of whether files are on an accessible path on the server
Fix: Escaped URLs, such as those used by WP’s concatemoji, are now properly replaced with Destination URLs

1.1.2, October 22, 2015

Fix: Now handling 302, 303, 307 HTTP codes for redirection in addition to 301
Fix: Redirection now properly handles relative URLs

1.1.1, October 9, 2015

Fix: No longer checking for valid SSL certificates on local requests (allows for self-signed certs to work)
Fix: No longer creating redirect HTML pages for WP’s 301 redirects from /path to /path/
Fix: Improved URL extraction from CSS files, particularly from larger files

1.1.0, October 6, 2015

New: Relative URLs in HTML and CSS files are now identified for static file creation
New: 301 redirects are now identified and an HTML page is created to handle the redirection
Fix: Repeatedly generating static files in a local directory should no longer throw errors
Fix: System requirements issues should no longer continue to display an error for one pageview past when the error is resolved

1.0.2, October 4, 2015

Fix: PHP 5.4 array initialization syntax caused errors in PHP <= 5.3

1.0.1, September 29, 2015

Fix: Settings/options are now deleted upon uninstallation

1.0.0, September 21, 2015

New: Initial release