Feature request: Export a WordPress site to a flat-file HTML site

Question

The trend is for headless WordPress and flat-file HTML sites, which run much faster but lose the functionality of a database.

I am not sure if you consider this to be in WordPress plugin territory, and not Webinoly's, but they (the plugin devs) are not making a very good job of it at the moment.

I am just now studying whether its possible to do it with WP CLI (I believe it is), but I wondered if it could be made even easier with with Webinoly comand line structure, something like 

sudo site domain.tld -clone-from=dev.domain.tld -wp-to-html -replace-content=[search-this,replace-with]

It would require multiple -replace-content variables to rewrite folders and html urls.

Just an idea.

Answer 1

There is a plugin for that as far as I know: https://wordpress.org/plugins/static-html-output-plugin/

I don't know if this could be practical for a dynamic website, though. For example, it doesn't work with eshops, for obvious reasons.

Comments

Yes, that's the one I have been using and working with Leon, the developer, to test it out.  

It does a pretty good job and its stable, but not really finished, if you know what I mean. Still needs quite a lot of setup.

The problems come when you try and remove all traces of WP from the output.

There has to be a programmatic way of catching the WP urls, but it's the themes and plugins, and CSS branding too which is a dead giveaway its from WP.

The problem is everyone has different themes and plugins.

Answer 2

That's totally out of the scope of this project, but here are some thoughts:

• That's what FastCGI does (partially) or any other WP cache.
• Copy all the HTML of your page and with some minor tweaks I'm sure it will work.

Regards.

Comments

Thanks, I’ll take a look at doing it the way you suggest.