How do plugins like WP Super Cache https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/ compare with straight HTML pages? The extra overhead is in the PHP serving up the cached HTML page, but how effective is it in comparison? More of the static site development setups don't have an admin system that compares with WP, is there a WP plugin to export to a static site?
> is there a WP plugin to export to a static site?
Here is one I found [1], I've never used it though, so I don't know how good it is. I'm sure there are others as well. It would be nice if there were a static site generator with an interface as nice as WP.
It would be nice if wordpress itself had the option of pressing a button saying - push to static. When you make an edit -> update static files. This would be fantastically easier + it would potentially mean 1/4 of the web gets faster overnight.
Unfortunately you'd have to at least modify most WP plugins to get them to work with this new system. At some point it becomes easier just to try to move everyone over to a born-static platform like Ghost.
ModX - a PHP cms which is fairly popular has a static site exporter. I havent' played with modx in a while, hopefully it's still a feature since their many updates in the last 5 years.
I was really meaning when you hit publish it would auto-reflow all the static pages. The great news is WordPress could come up with a static way of using javascript for things like sidebars so you wouldn’t necessarily have to repaint every page with every blog post.
Something like call partial (list of recent blog posts) which itself could be static. Two-to-three static calls and you could have a very clean and robust system with no database queries.
What makes you think that it would grow its adoption rate at all? If I were to take a guess, I'd say most Wordpress installations are done by people who don't care about server load, and don't fret out over a 2s load time instead of 200ms.
WP Super Cache is a good starting point.
Taken alone is not enough though.
Most web shared hosting where custom wp are configured use Apache which doesn't solve the problem because apache (2.2, the 2.4 version should have improved a bit) spawns processes containing the PHP modules, therefore using more ram than it actually needs to process an html page.
This issue is vastly solved if you have a Nginx webserver with a good configuration.
You can also improve that if you use memcached and the nginx memcached_pass, which directly outputs the memcached cached html without passing through php, giving a super-boost to response times. (to use this feature, checkout the WP-FFPC plugin)
If one page ends up on reddit/hackernews/producthunt homepage, a system designed like this should support the bump with relatively small issue.
Obviously if many people start commenting you will still have performance issue because that's when the php part is called (and that's the most memory expensive).
If you configure WP Super Cache correctly (e.g. rewrites), you won't be running any PHP when visiting the cached version of the site. So there's really no need to "export" anything.
Edit: WP caching benchmarks http://cd34.com/blog/scalability/wordpress-cache-plugin-benc...