Wordpress or hard code ?

Yep. Also separating menus out etc and including into every page rather than having to update every page if you add a menu item for instance.

 

The snag with that is that you've got to run a PHP script behind the scenes for every page-load. That's fine on a small to medium traffic site, but on a busy site it's quite a hefty extra load compared to just loading a few KB of highly-optimised, minified static HTML.

Plus unless you fiddle with server settings to run all .html files through the PHP processor, it forces you to create links that end in filenames like page1.php, which will then be less portable (since you've got to have PHP running on the hosting package). They also don't look as intuitive as .html pages, and I believe they may not save as readily in some browsers either.

But using a bunch of includes makes content management a lot easier, so it's swings and roundabouts.

 

You can make a caching script to serve only static HTML. If you want to update something you just need to manually execute your script to make new HTML files for your cache or you can create a cron job for automatic periodic recaching.
That way you can update multiple pages like with a dynamic site but your server will only be loading static HTML.
It is not so difficult to do with PHP.

 

Hi carlos,

Excuse my ignorance, but most hosts seem to offer static cache options these days ? Is this something different ?

 

I didn't knew that, I've been generating my own cached pages for years, maybe I'm outdated.
But for curiosity, if hosts offer this service, why plugins like wp-cache are so popular?

 

Actually apologies..lill rephrase that. MY host offers it, with quite a few options, and im sure ive seen elsewhere that others do whilst researching .I'm starting to get into this stuff and realising that my American hosting for mostly UK based sites is not really doing me any favours.Although they do now now have UK servers. Its been great and one of those where I had the server years ago because i got a good deal but starting to suspect I need to move home.

 

Thanks for all the input on this. Appreciated. I've decided to experiment with a bootstrap site.

Now... next thing. What do you chaps count as essential meta tags these days ? Any specific open graph or old school metas like "keywords" that I should absolutely be using, and any that you can bin these days ?

 

It doesn't matter as you can display the url however you want with .htaccess. All my pages on domainview are .html but of course they're not. As for overhead it's miniscule on any entry level dedicated server. Far less than wordpress.