The MakeStaticSite website is static – which means that not only is it fast, you can download a copy in its entirety and work with it offline.
The site has been composed in WordPress using the Twenty Twenty-Two theme, initially without any customisation beyond what’s available through the dashboard. The theme was chosen to demonstrate the tool’s ready applicability to mainstream scenarios.
The following plugins have been used:
- Perform helps streamline WordPress ahead of static site generation by removing unwanted and unnecessary extras.
- Really Simple SSL ensures uniformity of content delivery under a secure protocol
- SimTerm, based on Show Your Terms, provides the animated terminal on the home page. A few changes made to get past the errors reported by PHP 8, mainly concerning the use of static methods. Also, JavaScript tweaks to allow additional styling such as multiple colours per line (with the assistance of Raw HTML plugin).
- Timeline Block for Gutenberg enables the workflow diagram, illustrating the phases in MakeStaticSite.
- Twentig is a theme customiser providing various enhancements.
- WP Last Modified Info generates the creation and modification dates at the foot of each page.
- WP Rollback is a handy tool to restore a previous version of a plugin when an upgrade goes awry.
- WP Static Search is a drop-in replacement for the default site search. The original plugin has been modified on Github, further tweaked in the version used for MakeStaticSite. Modifications have focused on offline use (no http), dropping the use of workers, with the intention to set up a new project, WP Offline Search.
A few other plugins have been used along the way, including
- Enable Media Replace was used to swap screenshot images
- Restricted Site Access is essential for the scenario of providing access restrictions on third-party hosting (as part of site conversion). This is not currently the case for this website, but might be in future.
Many thanks to the developers of all these plugins.
For the static version of this site, MakeStaticSite was run with the following configuration settings.