Frequently asked questions

Yes, if you want to keep using WordPress to edit and publish your site. Visitors use the static copy, while WordPress remains your content management system at a separate, preferably protected address.

With the self-hosted plugin, you arrange hosting for WordPress and the static files, which can be on the same server or different providers. Staatic Cloud includes both managed WordPress hosting and hosting for your public static site. Read more about preparing your hosting setup or getting started with Staatic Cloud.

The premium edition of Staatic comes with many additional features as well as form and search integration. Additionally we provide extensive technical support whenever you need it. For a complete list of features, have a look at the features overview.

Yes. Test a copy of your WordPress site and publish it to a separate destination before changing your live hosting or DNS. Staatic Cloud offers a 14-day trial and a temporary address for this. You can also test the free Community plugin with a separate WordPress installation and deployment destination.

Check your pages, forms, search and other interactive features before switching. See the requirements and trial information to get started.

Create a Staatic Cloud site and use Import WordPress Backup on its WordPress tab. The importer supports UpdraftPlus backup bundle ZIPs and full single-site Duplicator archive ZIPs; larger backups can be uploaded over SFTP first.

Importing replaces the target WordPress instance but does not publish it automatically. Review your imported content and functionality, then publish and connect your domain when you are ready. Follow the WordPress import guide for the steps and supported backup formats.

Static sites have some limitations that dynamic sites do not have, causing specific functionality that requires a backend able to process requests dynamically to fail. For example, form submission handling and search will not work out of the box. For most cases there are solutions or alternatives available though.

Staatic aims to provide solutions for most common limitations. Where we are unable to provide a solution directly, usually alternatives exist. If you are unsure whether Staatic will work for your specific case, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us.

In many cases, yes. Staatic publishes the pages generated by your existing WordPress setup, so you can keep using your familiar editor. Features that generate their output when a page loads in WordPress are generally suitable.

Features that call WordPress while a visitor uses the site, such as some AJAX filters or account tools, need separate handling. Test a published copy, including its interactive features, before switching. The compatibility overview explains what works on a static site and what needs an alternative.

No. At least, it should not. If the static version of your site does differ, it is probably because of invalid HTML in your original WordPress site, which could not be converted correctly. In that case you can verify the validity of your HTML using a validator service like W3C Markup Validation Service.

Another reason could be a missing stylesheet/javascript that Staatic was unable to detect during the crawling phase. You could check if there are any failed network requests on your static site using the developer toolbar within your browser. If a file is missing (returning a 404 not found), you can manually add it’s location to Additional URLs within the plugin’s Build settings.

Contact forms need a service to receive submissions from the static site. With an active Staatic Premium subscription, Staatic Forms supports Contact Form 7, Divi Contact Form, Gravity Forms and WPForms, with email notifications, automatic replies and webhooks. You can also connect custom HTML forms manually.

Check any plugin-specific actions or multi-page workflows and test a submission before going live. The forms integration guide explains how to enable the integration and which workflows are supported.

Yes. With an active Staatic Premium subscription, Staatic Search provides an autocomplete widget that searches through Staatic’s service rather than WordPress. You choose which public post types to include, and publishing updates the search index.

It provides suggestions linking to matching pages, rather than automatically preserving your theme’s WordPress search-results page or advanced filters. See the search integration guide for setup and customization.

Not as a fully static replacement for those features. WooCommerce carts and checkout, member logins, account pages and personalized content need a dynamic backend.

You can publish suitable public pages statically while keeping those features in a separately configured dynamic area, or use a compatible external service. That requires additional setup and testing; Premium and Cloud do not automatically make these features static. The migration checklist covers what to assess before switching.

Keep editing your content in WordPress as usual, then publish with Staatic to update the site your visitors see. Saving a change in WordPress does not update the static site on its own.

With an active Staatic Premium subscription, you can automate publications or use Publish Changes for tracked content updates. For changes to menus, templates, themes or site-wide styling, use Publish Everything. See the publishing guide for the available options.

Publication time depends on how many pages and files are included, how quickly WordPress generates them, and where you deploy them. A media-heavy site can contain far more files than its page count suggests.

Premium’s Publish Changes can reduce the work for ordinary content updates. Run a representative publication to assess your setup, and use the publication summary to see where the time is spent. The troubleshooting guide covers common causes of slow publications.

Normally when users visit your site, WordPress dynamically generates the requested page on the fly, every time again. Depending on the WordPress theme and plugins installed, as well as the server hosting WordPress, this can be a very intensive process.

Staatic acts as a user visiting all of the pages of your WordPress site and saving them as static (ready to be served) HTML files. These files can be hosted anywhere, including on CDNs (content delivery network) and multiple edge locations, causing a huge boost in your site’s performance.

Note that while existing WordPress caching plugins can improve WordPress performance as well, Staatic takes it a step further by making WordPress completely obsolete from the user’s perspective. This opens a world of new possibilities to further improve performance, as well as availability and security.

WordPress itself is pretty secure, as long as best practices are followed. Best practices include installing only safe plugins and themes, keeping WordPress (as well as server software) up to date and using security plugins to monitor your site.

Staatic completely removes WordPress from the process of serving pages to your users. All content of your site is pregenerated and can be passed on to your users immediately, greatly reducing the attack surface. In addition this makes it possible to host your site anywhere, including on CDNs (Content Delivery Network) and multiple edge locations, since there is no server side processing involved.

You can keep your public domain, page URLs and SEO metadata, but check the published site before switching. Canonical URLs, sitemaps and internal links should point to your public domain rather than the WordPress or preview address.

Verify important redirects on your static host and keep the WordPress origin and previews out of search results. Static publishing does not guarantee better rankings. Use the static WordPress SEO checklist to review your setup.