The Make Me Static plugin is finally available in the WordPress Plugin Directory. It’s taken a fair bit or work to produce something that holds up to the scrutiny of WordPress reviewers but hopefully the end result is worth it.

What does it do?

It keeps a static version of your site synchronised with a Git repository in such a way that the repository can be used to automatically publish it’s contents to a static page provider.

What is it for?

• Speeds up your site by many (many) orders of magnitude
• Means your site won’t die because of a WordPress or plugin bug
• Makes it difficult (or relatively impossible) to DDOS your site
• Allows the site to be hosted on free static page platforms

How to Install it

In your WordPress Admin panel, visit “plugins”, select “Add New” then in the search box type “make me static”. Click on the “Install” button, then on the “Activate” button. You should see the “MakeMeStatic” link appear in the left hand menu.

 How does it compare?

… to the competition. Well, it doesn’t really. There are plugins about that help you to generate a static copy of your site, but it’s a relatively manual and error-prone procedure. Then when you’re done you are still left with a static copy of your site in a local file-system.

This is literally an end-to-end solution, once configured you can make a change to your site, press a button on the admin control button and wait .. and your live site will be automatically updated with no manual effort required.

How long does it take to update a site?

Well it depends on a number of factors, primarily your size of your site and your choice of static site provider. A small site will typically take between 20 seconds and a minute to sync, then page providers tend to take 20-30 seconds to update.

For larger sites, 4000 pages from scratch can take as long as half an hour with subsequent re-sync’s taking of the order of 10 minutes. Again this depends, if you are just updating a single page that doesn’t affect anything else, 10 seconds is feasible. If on the other hand you have pages that link to postings and archives, many of which will change when you add a new post, many pages may need to be updates, which takes longer.

Does it .. ?

• Mangle URL’s to present the site on a different URL? – yes
• Play nice with forms? – yes (depending on the forms plugin being used)
• Work with search? – yes (assuming your site is set up “correctly”)
• Work with comments? – yes (assuming your site is set up “correctly”)
• Cost to use? – not at a basic level, you can pay for more speed / capacity
• Handle multiple profiles for A+B testing? – yes
• Allow you to track and view assets that are problematic? – yes
• Let you see what is and what isn’t being uploaded to Git? – yes

More information

• The Make Me Static Plugin page here
• The Make Me Static entry in the WordPress Directory