Static HTML vs. WordPress Websites

Static HTML vs. WordPress Websites: What to Consider

In the ever-evolving landscape of web development and content management, choosing the right platform for your website is a crucial decision. Two popular options that often come into play are static HTML and WordPress. While both have their merits, they cater to different needs and preferences. In this article, we'll explore the pros and cons of static HTML and WordPress websites, helping you make an informed choice based on your specific requirements. Whether you're a seasoned web developer or a novice looking to establish an online presence, understanding the considerations involved can make a significant difference in the success of your digital venture.

If you prefer not to invest your time and resources in building a custom website using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you can create your website easily using one of the many available publishing platforms, website builders, and content management systems in the market.

Among these solutions, Content Management Systems (CMS) are the most popular. They allow you to easily customize your website's design, add multimedia to your posts, organize content based on tags and categories, manage multiple users, edit underlying code, and more.

CMS websites are highly user-friendly. They are easy to use, require minimal to no coding knowledge, and offer multiple options for functionality. They are a tempting choice for first-time website builders, but what exactly is a static HTML website, and how does it compare?

While creating static HTML websites is relatively straightforward (one HTML file equals one web page), maintaining them can be inefficient because all personalized or dynamic content must be directly encoded within the HTML files, and any changes to the site's structure need to be made within each HTML file. Therefore, maintaining a large static website demands a significant amount of time and effort.

The solution to this issue is a dynamic website. Dynamic websites, instead of having a library of pre-existing HTML files, generate web pages on the server-side when requested. When you visit a page on a dynamic website, the web server processes your request, creates an HTML file from stored data using a programming language like PHP, and then sends the new HTML file for display in your browser. This provides much greater flexibility and a more personalized experience for individual visitors.

Dynamic websites can be programmed from scratch but are typically implemented using a website builder, platform, or Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress.

Now, let's compare WordPress with HTML, considering all of these aspects together.

HTML/CSS/JavaScript vs. WordPress

To create a website from scratch and do it well, you'll need a developer. A developer uses HTML, CSS, and sometimes JavaScript to build web pages. While building a website from scratch may require more time and cost, this option brings a customized look and a personalized experience for your visitors.

WordPress is a flexible Content Management System (CMS) that allows multiple users to create and run a website. While it primarily uses the PHP programming language, most users can set up a WordPress site without coding.

Customizing a WordPress site is straightforward compared to simple HTML sites, which usually require a developer to make even minor changes. On the other hand, maintaining HTML websites is easier since they don't need to be compatible with plugins that help a CMS like WordPress function correctly.

Now that we've briefly discussed the differences in building and managing a static HTML site versus a WordPress site, let's talk about how WordPress and HTML work together.

Do Content Management Systems like WordPress Use HTML?

The short answer is yes. WordPress and other Content Management Systems use HTML.

The long answer is that WordPress is not originally written in HTML. Its core software, as well as plugins and themes for WordPress, are primarily written in PHP, a programming language that controls how WordPress interacts with its database.

PHP is a server-side language, meaning it runs entirely on the server hosting your website. When a visitor enters your site's web page URLs, your server receives their request, executes PHP code, retrieves the relevant data from your WordPress database, and then turns that data into an HTML file (along with accompanying CSS files) to send to the visitor who made the request. Since the core of WordPress is written in PHP, third-party developers can create plugins and themes that execute on their own PHP files. These plugins and themes are often free or relatively inexpensive, allowing you to customize your website's appearance without needing to code it yourself.

So, while a WordPress site may look and operate like a static HTML site to end-users, the process of how content is organized and presented to users is significantly different.

While a hosting server must compile your WordPress posts or pages using PHP and database queries, each page of a static website is stored as a separate HTML file and exists in its entirety. No assembly is required. This is because HTML, like CSS and JavaScript, is a client-side language. HTML runs on the device of the visitor accessing a website, not on the server hosting it.

Let's see what this means in terms of speed.

Speed of HTML vs. WordPress

Online consumers don't want to waste time waiting for a website to load. In fact, page speed is so crucial to the user experience that Google has incorporated it as one of its ranking factors for both desktop and mobile. The main reason for including speed in its algorithm is that data showed visitors spend less time on slower websites. According to a 2021 study by Website Builder Expert, one in four visitors leaves a site that takes more than 4 seconds to load.

To ensure a good user experience and reduce bounce rates on your site, you must consider speed when deciding how to build your site. Let's compare the speed of WordPress and HTML websites below.

Speed of WordPress:

The drawback of WordPress sites, which require PHP and a database, is the impact on load times. Every time a visitor lands on your site, your server has to execute PHP code and retrieve data from your database to display the correct information to the visitor. Since this requires more server resources compared to a static HTML site, it can increase loading times and delays.

However, by choosing a fast hosting provider, investing in a Content Delivery Network (CDN), optimizing and compressing images, and performing other actions to boost your WordPress site's speed, you can work toward overcoming the 4-second load time that customers expect.

Speed of HTML:

As mentioned earlier, HTML websites don't require the execution of PHP or database queries to load. This means that with optimization, HTML websites are faster than WordPress websites.

Several steps can be taken to optimize an HTML site to ensure fast loading times. These steps include removing unnecessary white space, eliminating unnecessary comment sections, regular content caching, reducing the number of inline scripts, resizing and compressing images, using lazy loading for images, and more. It's important to note that many of these steps are best practices for maintaining a website, which means they also help reduce load times for WordPress.

Ease of Use: HTML vs. WordPress

You want the process of creating a website to be as easy and quick as possible. However, often, ease of use comes at the cost of flexibility. The more control you have over website management and design, the more challenging it becomes to create and manage it. The easier the process, the less control you have.

So, choosing a platform comes down to some extent to whether ease of use or flexibility is more important to you. With this in mind, let's compare the ease of use of a WordPress site with HTML.

Ease of Use with WordPress:

With WordPress, you can own a website without needing to code from scratch or even know how to code at all. You can easily create and manage content, change the appearance of your site, configure its settings in an internal dashboard, and easily extend its functionality through plugins.

Ease of Use with HTML:

Creating and managing a pure HTML site requires a good understanding of HTML, CSS, and often JavaScript. You have to manually code every aspect of the site, which can be time-consuming and may require expertise in web development.

To increase the flexibility of the platform through these methods, you need to allocate more resources to manage your website. Updating plugins, themes, and software are essential management tasks to keep your site secure and prevent compatibility issues.

Online stores, small businesses, and other companies looking to grow their brand and customer base prefer building with this open-source CMS due to its user-friendly nature, even if it requires more daily management.

Ease of Use with HTML:

Tasks that are straightforward in WordPress, such as adding and editing content, expanding site functionality, and altering its appearance, can be much more challenging when building an HTML site. This is because you won't have a dashboard with features and buttons, themes, or built-in plugins to automate these tasks. You'll have to write HTML and CSS yourself—or pay someone to do it.

There are ways to speed up the process. You can use open-source frameworks like BootstrapCSS, which provides pre-designed buttons, navigation bars, forms, tables, and other components you don't need to build from scratch, with pre-built code snippets.

If you don't anticipate the need for regular updates or changes to your website, it's better to build an HTML site (or contact a web developer to create one). This path requires fewer server resources, making it easier to build. After deployment, you won't have to worry about software updates or third-party plugin updates to keep it secure.

Restaurants, gyms, boutiques, and other small businesses looking to establish a simple online presence will find this option appealing. While the initial time and cost investment for creating an HTML site may be higher than a WordPress site, daily management will be much easier.

HTML vs. WordPress for SEO:

If you're investing this amount of time to create a website for your business, you probably want people to see it, right? To increase your website's visibility, you need to rank on the first page of major search engines for keywords related to your business.

To drive organic traffic to your site, you need to optimize your on-page and technical SEO. Let's compare building a site in WordPress and building one from scratch in this regard.

SEO for WordPress:

WordPress allows you to easily customize your alt text, meta descriptions, headings, and custom URLs in your dashboard, eliminating the need to edit a line of code.

You can also choose from thousands of responsive themes to design a mobile-friendly website. Installing and activating a responsive theme takes just a few clicks, and you don't need to worry about defining meta viewport tags or setting text in viewport width units.

If you lack experience or knowledge in SEO, you can download or purchase a collection of WordPress plugins to assist you. Plugins like Yoast SEO, WP Rocket, and Redirection allow you to control many technical and on-page SEO aspects of your site.

SEO for HTML:

There are various ways to optimize an HTML site for search engines—you just need to know how to do it.

Adding keywords to your posts and pages, internal and external linking, optimizing URLs, header tags, meta descriptions, and image alt tags are all familiar best practices.

However, unlike website builder platforms, you cannot use any buttons in the dashboard or third-party plugins to assist you with these tasks. Instead, you will need to spend your time creating appropriate tags and codes for your site or hire someone to do this for you.

While optimizing your on-page SEO in the mentioned steps above is relatively straightforward, technical SEO optimization will be much more challenging. For instance, adding menus and pagination to your site requires time and coding, whereas WordPress provides features and internal plugins to add these functionalities.

Building a responsive site from scratch requires defining meta viewport tags, changing text and images' sizes, adding queries, and more.

HTML vs. WordPress for Blogging:

WordPress for Blogging:

Although WordPress has evolved into a multipurpose CMS, it was originally created as a blogging platform. Therefore, it comes with many built-in features that make it easy for you to create blog content.

Using the Gutenberg editor, you can drag and drop elements onto the page to create multimedia-rich blog posts and pages. Once your article is ready, you can schedule, publish, update, and delete posts and pages as needed. You can also moderate comments, assign user roles and permissions, make your content public or private, and secure posts and pages with passwords.

The best part? You can do all of these tasks correctly within your dashboard without the need for access to or editing of your source code.

If you are a more advanced user with coding skills, you can add code to your files to style category pages, display recent posts in the sidebar, and extend your site's functionality in other ways.

WordPress combines ease of use and flexibility for advancing your blogging efforts by offering these features and access to its source code.

HTML for Blogging:

Using HTML and CSS, you can create more complex blog posts compared to WordPress. You can insert images, format headings, add lists, create tables, display posts in your sidebar, and anything else you can think of—just write the code to make it happen.

As you can imagine, this takes time. For example, suppose you want to display a simple list in your posts. In WordPress, you can easily drag and drop a list block onto your page. In an HTML site, you would need to add the following code:

While if you create an HTML site, you will have complete control over the structure and design of your content, applying this control requires a deep understanding of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Since most users who want to add this type of content to their site need to hire a developer, those looking for regular blog post publishing might be better off using WordPress.

Advantages and Disadvantages of WordPress and HTML:

WordPress:

• Software: Open-source Content Management System (CMS).

• HTML Usage: Yes, but primarily built with PHP. When a user visits your website, the PHP code on your hosting server queries the database for relevant content and then packages it into an HTML file to serve to users.

• Speed: Slower as it requires more server resources.

• Ease of Use: Provides an internal dashboard, built-in themes and plugins, customization, and site management, making it user-friendly.

• SEO: Allows configuration of SEO settings in the dashboard and offers a variety of plugins to control on-page and technical SEO.

• Blogging: Offers an advanced in-built block editor for users to create and manage content easily. Advanced users can edit code for customization.

• Control: Provides flexibility but requires a significant investment in time and deep coding knowledge for customization.

HTML:

• Software: Websites are not based on any underlying software – it's all code. If you're a developer, this can be great, but if not, managing it can be challenging.

• HTML Usage: Yes, websites are entirely separate HTML files.

• Speed: Tends to load faster than WordPress as it requires fewer server resources, although it depends on adherence to best practices.

• Ease of Use: Editing an image or a sidebar menu can be tedious and time-consuming in an HTML site unless a developer does this for you.

• Price: Initial costs can be higher for HTML websites as they are custom-coded. Maintenance and changes may not require ongoing developer payments.

• SEO: HTML websites are usually in the hands of a developer and SEO specialist who work together to create custom tags in the source code for better search engine visibility.

• Blogging: While HTML sites offer more customization options, the speed and accessibility for a high volume of blog posts may be compromised if you don't have a developer on hand.

In conclusion, whether WordPress or HTML is suitable for you depends on your goals, budget, coding skills, and your willingness to develop those skills further. Consider what kind of user experience you want to provide, either a completely customized one or a dynamic and flexible one. Your website can be a valuable asset for your business as long as you prioritize the needs of your end users.