Victoria's Blog

Website theme and hosting method change

For those of you who have visited my site before, you may have noticed I’ve completely changed the theme 🙂 It’s still very much work in progress but it finally reached a point where I was happy enough to publish it to the wider world.

I’d gotten a little board with the previous WordPress theme and changing the theme coincided nicely with changing the way I host the website. Up until now, I’ve been running WordPress for over 10 years after I decided to give up on maintaining my own hand written php website. For those that host WordPress sites like mine, there’s always the continual wonder as to whether you’ll come home one day and find its been hacked because you forgot to update it in a while…

In September 2019 at work I was introduced to a WordPress plugin called WP2Static. For those that haven’t heard of it, it’s a fantastic plugin which enables you to export a WordPress site into a pure html/css/javascript and images. This not only runs faster on shared hosting (like I’m on at the time of writing) but reduces the risk of seeing your cherished website defaced.

To start the process of moving from WordPress to a static site, I took a complete copy of my website and ran it on my home server (changing the urls to the servers address). This gave me the benefit of being able to test out the WP2Static plugin on my home website as well as starting the process of writing a new theme without affecting current website visitors.

The WP2Static plugin works quite fast on my website despite the 170+ posts I’ve accumulated over the years (some of which I look back on now and think… why did I post that!) but on my Mum’s old school work blog it takes over 10 minutes to trawl through all the pages.

One way to cut down on the export time is a theme which lists more posts per page than I previously had configured in WordPress – however if those posts are long (like this rambling one…) then having multiple posts per page can negatively affect pagespeed performance. I therefore needed to write myself a theme which would list only the first paragraph or so on the page views but have the ability to “read on” into an interesting post. As well as performance, I personally prefer websites which list multiple posts vertically with only the first paragraph or so next to a feature image.

There’s still bits of the site which need finishing off… when this post goes live, it’ll also go live with code syntax styling which was missing from the first draft.

I hope you like the new theme but if you notice something that’s broken or could be improved, please drop me a line 🙂

p.s. a lot of the lovely post title images are from a fantastic website called pexels.com