Statically served wordpress content
I’m currently still evaluating hugo and jekyll, themes and plugins, as an alternative to the current WordPress site. Until I decide what route to eventually go with, I had a look at WordPress plugins to generate static versions of a site.
Simply Static looked fine and I gave it a spin, it can easily crawl through the site and you can provide additional file/urls/directories to add to the static version (as well as exemptions).
The static version of the website is created regularly and stored locally, so I added a few ansible tasks to set up a periodic rsync of the files to my webserver that serves static content.
I have a HAProxy load balancer in front of my webservers that I have configured to serve the static version of the website first, and fall back to the wordpress server as a backup (that also gives me a nice redundancy, so I can update and reboot servers without causing a downtime).
HAProxy is also configured to always send certain requests (admin interface, search) to the WordPress server since they require PHP. This all happens transparently for the user.
I’m not going to bore with the details since it was all pretty standard stuff. It’s nothing fancy, but it looks reliable and does what it should.
I have this blog entry scheduled to go live in a few days, so we’ll see if all the automatisms work and the static version of the page generated and synced to the webserver.