HTML Site for Speed

[phogan]

I have a few small sites and landing pages on Wordpress that I want to load a lot quicker than they do.  It occurred to me that if there is not a lot of content management necessary, I should simply make the static web pages straight html instead of trying all the modifications necessary to get some Wordpress sites and themes to load quicker.    I have noticed the html sites I have load lighting fast on slow hosting service.

Is this a good idea, can anyone think of drawbacks to it?  Security?  Responsiveness? SEO?

And what about taking some company's sites with blog straight html so the home page loads quick, and then using Wordpress for the blog?

[LeadDiscovery]

What is your main goal? What issues/consequences are you experiencing that has you considering this change?

We find some themes, even simple landing page themes for wordpress are very poorly coded and can result in slow DL times. Othertimes its the additional plugins, but I think you know this.

My suggestion: If the overhead of WP is the actual cause of your slower speeds, and the sites you are discussing make little use of the features WP offers, then it is certainly worth a try. Generally we can knock out a landing page or micro site using dreamweaver in a few hours.

[dudleycarr]

Moving to a purely static version of the site could certainly have some performance improvements, but that alone is not a guarantee of reduced latency for your customers. You're also likely to lose some flexibility that a platform like Wordpress offers in terms of managing the site.

My suggestion would be to start off by analyzing your site using Google's Page Speed service and then see if there are options within WordPress to eliminate the worst performance offenders reported by the service.

http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/