Author: Ash

WordPress is the most popular tool for building websites and is definitely my favourite. But recently, I’ve been leaning into building old school static websites again. But what are the benefits of going back to static vs WordPress?

Development

Developing websites in WordPress is designed around scalability, content addition and on-the-fly modification. However, the flip side of this is that all of the customisation can take a lot of development time early on, in order to save time over the lifetime of the website.

In a static website, the development is based around the specifics of the site as it is, without much regard for what it will become as it changes, because, as the name suggests, it’s not intended to change much. So, with that in mind, the development is quicker with a view to creating a specific end product. Most sites don’t actually change their core content very often, if at all, so the extra development cost can be somewhat wasteful, especially if the site isn’t going to contain a blog.

Maintenance

Even on the most basic website, you’ll need to run maintenance on it to ensure it’s secure, running as expected and technologically up to date. On WordPress, this is a regular occurrence, as the nature of WordPress sites means that you’ll have a lot of different technology present on a site at once, usually in the form of plugins. These will need updating and testing to check for conflicts whilst also being aware of security vulnerabilities. 

To say none of this is the case with a static site would be untrue, however, there’s a lot more control and far less to worry about in that regard. However, WordPress does allow for quicker and cleaner updates and improvements to a site whereas doing it manually on a static site leaves a lot of room for error.

Content Management

It should come as no surprise that the world’s number one content management system is pretty good at content management. Adding images, videos and files to WordPress is incredibly easy, they get added to an appropriate file system and they’re incredibly easy to access and reference both for developers and casual users, which makes it a popular choice long-term for people who want to have a site built and then manage it themselves, rather than relying on a developer to make all the changes.

A static site, however, requires a knowledge of file structure, FTP and at the very least, some decent HTML knowledge. You get a little bit more in terms of control, but it’s definitely a point in favour of WordPress. Dynamic websites require a dynamic solution – that’s the long and short of it.

SEO

Getting your site to show up on Google is a key part of a website’s long term success. Now, there’s no specific benefit either way between WordPress or static, however, WordPress makes some of the on-site SEO quicker and easier with plugins that allow you to track the effectiveness of your optimisation.

It’s still perfectly fine to do SEO on a static website, despite it being easier on WordPress. There’s nothing stopping you from having all of the correct metadata, and of course, the majority of the SEO benefit is going to come from the value of the content, it’s just going to require a little more skill and knowledge.

Overall

There’s not much that separates the end product you’d get from a static site vs a dynamic WordPress site. It’s simply about knowing what the site is, what it needs to be long term and developing accordingly. If the site is going to need to scale and change frequently with a lot of functionality, or requires non-developers to make changes to content, then WordPress is definitely the way to go.

However, if you need a simple static site with information that isn’t likely to change or be added to on a regular basis, then a static site will be perfectly fine to work with.

When using the web, we often engage in a shared consumption experience, be that information, provision or entertainment. But for many users, that shared experience isn’t equitable due to disability and society’s lack of consideration when it comes to disabled users. 

Disability Stats

In 2020, the Office of National Statistics reported that, in the UK alone, almost 11 million disabled adults were active or recent internet users.  

That equates to roughly 81% of disabled adults in the UK and 1/4 of the UK’s adult population.

That’s too large of a number to overlook, and yet, as a society and an industry, we still treat it as an afterthought. If ¼ of your audience were obstructed from engaging with your business, you’d change something fairly urgently, right? Well, it turns out, that’s already the case.

Disability Examples

When we think of disability, we typically think of the more obvious physical ailments that limit movement or severe learning difficulties that limit communication and social integration. And whilst these can affect how a user engages with the web, there are also less obvious ailments that have a similar impact.

Some common examples of these include:

• Dyslexia
• Colour-blindness
• Partial and full blindness
• Partial or full loss of fine motor function

Solutions

Creating solutions or designing visual products with these disabilities in mind may seem daunting or restrictive, however there are simple things that we can bake into our default thinking to make our workflow subconsciously disability friendly.

Colour

A very common accessibility issue is contrast. High contrast levels between backgrounds and text make things easy for both dyslexic and colour-blind users. However, the extreme contrast of pure white and pure black is actually a bad choice for ALL users. It puts a lot of strain on the eyes and also makes reading difficult for dyslexic users. Consider an off-white pale grey to replace white and a charcoal grey to replace black. In the grand scheme of things, it won’t affect the visual for the majority of users, but will make a difference to the overall viewing health of your audience. Also, consider a golden ratio of 5:1 contrast as a bare minimum.

Text

Sans-serif fonts are a lot easier for dyslexic people to read, with Arial, Comic Sans and Verdana standing out as common options. Fonts should also be a minimum of 16px for body text as a basic readability standard.

Code and navigation

Writing semantically-rich (read: correct-by-the-book) code is important for people who are unable to use a touchscreen or a mouse with the relative ease of your typical user. These members of your audience are likely to use third-party peripherals or keyboard-only navigation to path through your site and by writing code correctly, you can make it much easier for these users and their tools to parse your content effectively. Semantic-rich code is also essential for the correct functionality of screen readers. This means using the correct tags and elements, rather than just relying on styling to create layouts and experiences. Whilst a <section>, a <div> and an <aside> tag can all be used to separate content and can be functionally similar, for a screen reader, they’re different with specific purposes. In the same way, you could style H1-H6, body text and <code> text to all look exactly the same, but again, a screen reader treats each of them in the originally intended manner.  Without the code being written correctly, this can present a sub-par experience for those of your consumers with poor eyesight.

Overarching Point

Web and digital products are key tools in connecting us, our products and our services with our clients and communities, and there are simple but important steps we can take to make sure that everyone can engage with us, not just those without disability.

Source: Internet users, UK: 2020 – ONS

A slow website is one of the most frustrating things on the internet for users, site owners and search engines alike. For users, a slow site causes delay in a world where content is usually served in an instant. For search engines, a slow site is a marker of low quality, so search engines rarely push slow sites to the top of search rankings. And as a site owner, a slow site means that you’re making a poor impression on your visitors and most likely not getting the results you’d want from your site. So, how do we speed up your slow website, or stop it from being slow in the first place?

What is slowing down my website?

The key to speeding up a slow website is first understanding what make a website slow in the first place. Website speed, as most users will experience it, is the time it takes for the browser to display the necessary content. So, naturally, the more content on a page, the more time (in theory) it’ll take to load.

Web files (e.g .html, .css, .js) themselves are individually very small and don’t take much time to load in (although some of their actions and requests may take some time, but the main culprits on a slow site tend to be images, videos and other embedded elements.

How do I speed things up?

Of course, we don’t want you to build sites without images and videos, far from it. In fact, you can have all the visual content you like, simply by optimising it.

Images

With images, priming them for web is often simpler than people realise. A lot of images, especially photos, are naturally designed to look nice for print. These have far more detail than you’d ever be able to render on a screen, and as a result, the files are huge and take ages to load. However, you can use multiple online tools to reduce the pixel count to 72, lower the files size whilst keeping the image quality good enough for web.

• https://tinypng.com/

Also, for things like icons, or vector based images, web browsers are perfectly capable of displaying vectors as SVGs, either as the data or the file. Either way, these files use mathematical data to generate the images, which is much quicker for a computer than loading and drawing an image, resulting in a faster web page.

Video

When it comes to video, hosting them on your server and rendering them raw is usually not a great idea. Video files are huge, even in compressed formats like .mp4, so it’s not advised for you to do that on a server that’s usually designed to handle basic web files. You’ll also use your bandwidth pretty quickly.

Instead, host your videos on YouTube or Vimeo and allow them to cleverly compress and deliver your content to your viewers with no strain on your site. Also, because it’s hosted elsewhere and you’re embedding it, rather than rendering it, it has no effect on the load time of your webpage.

Javascript

Javascript files, whilst small, are a series of instructions and actions for a website to carry out under different circumstances. Some of this needs to happen as the page is loading and can block the render of the rest of the page until it completes its task. Minifying your code and ensuring that your js functions are written in a way that minimises blocking is incredibly beneficial in speeding up your slow web page.

On top of that, only loading scripts where they need to be used is a great way to eliminate wasted resources.

Caching

Enabling caching means that the browser can save a website’s resources in its current state, meaning that repeat viewers of the website won’t have to load CSS or JS from scratch every single time until those resources change or a certain amount of time has passed.

In conclusion…

Your slow website isn’t a death sentence by any means and some simple changes can be implemented to speed it up.