From WordPress to a static site, step by step
Four steps, one afternoon. Nothing on your WordPress site is changed at any point; we read it and build beside it.
The four steps
-
Install the plugin
A thin WordPress plugin inventories your site: plugins, forms, post types, menus. It sends nothing until you click Connect, and it never sends content, comments, or accounts.
-
See your preview
We crawl the public site the way a visitor would and build it at a private preview address. You get the link by email, usually the same day.
-
Pick Freeze or Rebuild
Freeze is a pixel-faithful copy of the site you have. Rebuild is a lean version of the same pages at the same URLs, with accessibility and schema checks built in and chat editing on top.
-
Go live
Point your domain at us from any registrar, or connect Cloudflare in one click. TLS is issued on demand. Your WordPress stays up for 14 days in case you want to go back.
What the plugin sends
The plugin is deliberately thin. It does nothing until an administrator clicks Connect. Then, on request, it sends an inventory: WordPress and PHP versions, the theme, the plugin list, public post type and taxonomy counts, menus, media count, form plugins and their notification addresses, shortcodes in use, and public URL counts. No post content, no comments, no accounts, no passwords.
When we crawl, the plugin recognizes our signed requests and turns off caching, minification, lazy loading, the admin bar, and head noise so the copy is clean. It also hands the crawler a complete list of your public URLs and redirect rules, so no page is missed. The full disclosure is on the plugin page.
What the crawl does
Two passes. An HTTP pass fetches every URL on the manifest and every asset those pages reference. A browser pass renders each page in Chrome to catch what scripts added. The result is a snapshot: a signed archive of files that is the input to both Freeze and Rebuild.
Along the way we score the site for compatibility. Forms, search, and galleries are fine. Stores, memberships, courses, forums, and directories are blockers; a site with one is quoted as a consult, and a site with three or more is declined at the preview stage with an explanation.
Freeze and Rebuild
Freeze serves the snapshot as-is: every page, every image, every stylesheet, at the same URL. It looks exactly like your site because it is your site, minus PHP. It is ready in minutes and it is the safety net under everything else.
Rebuild uses the snapshot and the structured export to regenerate the same pages as a lean Astro site: system fonts, inlined CSS, responsive images, no builder scripts. Same URLs, same redirects. On the 22 sites measured so far the median home page went from 5.6 MB to 128 KB and from 108.5 requests to 3.
Every Rebuild passes through build-time gates before it can be published: weight budgets, URL and redirect preservation, WCAG 2.2 AA checks with remediation, schema.org markup, an llms.txt index, a Markdown mirror of every page, and a machine-readable manifest. This marketing site is built the same way; append index.md to any URL here.
Forms, search, comments
- Forms keep their fields and their look. Submissions post to our endpoint, are stored in your portal, and are emailed to the addresses your form plugin used.
- Search is rebuilt as a static index generated at publish time. It works without a server and without sending queries anywhere.
- Comments are preserved as published text. New comments need a server; if they matter to your site, we say so at the preview stage.
- Redirects from your WordPress install and from redirect plugins are carried over, so old links keep landing.
Going live
You approve the preview and pay from the portal. The portal then asks you for one DNS record to prove you control the domain, then an A or CNAME record (or a one-click Cloudflare connection). Certificates are issued on demand when the first request arrives. Your WordPress host is untouched; keep it up for 14 days, then cancel it.
Editing after launch
On Rebuild, changes happen in chat. Describe what you want: a new phone number, a replaced photo, a notice on the home page, a new page for a service. Low-risk text edits apply immediately with an undo. Anything larger is shown to you first and waits for approval. Structural changes, like a new section type, are escalated to a person. Every published version is kept and can be restored.
On Freeze, you keep editing in WordPress and ask for a re-crawl when you are ready; the new snapshot replaces the old one in one step.