What is a static site generator?
A static site generator (SSG) is a tool that turns your content into a set of pre-built HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. The result is a "static" copy of your website that's ready to be served exactly as-is. Simply Static is a static site generator built for WordPress, so you get all the benefits of going static without leaving the platform you already know.
Static vs. dynamic websites
A standard WordPress site is dynamic. Every time someone visits a page, WordPress runs PHP, queries the database, assembles the HTML, and sends it back. That work happens again on every single request.
A static site skips all of that. The pages are generated in advance and saved as plain files. When a visitor arrives, the server simply hands over the finished file. There's no database call and no PHP running at the moment of the request.
Why go static?
Serving pre-built files instead of generating them on the fly brings a few big advantages:
- Speed: Plain files load fast, especially when served from a CDN.
- Security: With no live database or PHP executing when a page is requested, the attack surface is dramatically smaller. There's simply much less to exploit.
- Reliability & scale: Static files are cheap to host and easy to serve, so traffic spikes are far less likely to take your site down.
- Lower cost: Static hosting is often cheaper (and sometimes free) compared to running a full dynamic stack.
The traditional approach (and its trade-offs)
Most static site generators, such as Hugo, Jekyll, Eleventy, Astro, and Gatsby, are command-line-based. They're powerful, but they generally expect you to write your content in Markdown, learn a templating language, and run build commands from a terminal.
For a lot of people, that means giving up the things that make WordPress productive: the block editor, your page builder, your themes, and the huge ecosystem of plugins you already rely on.
Where Simply Static comes in
Simply Static takes a different route. Instead of replacing WordPress, it works on top of it.
You keep creating and editing content in WordPress exactly as you do today, using the same editor or page builder, the same themes, and the same plugins. When you're ready, Simply Static crawls your site, collects every page and asset, rewrites the URLs so everything points to the right place, and produces a clean static copy you can publish anywhere.
The result: you get the speed, security, and scalability of a static site while keeping the familiar WordPress workflow. There's no command line and no new templating language to learn.
Publishing your static site
Because your generated site is just files, you can host it almost anywhere: a regular web host, object storage, or a CDN. Simply Static can export to a local directory or a ZIP file, and Simply Static Pro adds direct deployment to popular hosting and CDN providers.
You'll find step-by-step setup guides for each option in the Deployment section.