Online archival site best practices

  • I’ve done an initial test with Simply Static and I must say that I’m very impressed with what it can do.

    Before continuing though I’d like to inquire about best practices. I am going to create static versions of sites in a multisite install that will serve as static archives of the existing WordPress versions (which are no longer being updated at all).

    The existing URL of the front of the site (and all pages) is significant, however, because there are many incoming links I don’t want to break. Therefore I have questions.

    A. If I create a folder with the same name as my sub-site in my web root, it will point to the same place that the WordPress is pointing to through server magic. Will this even work?

    B. One option would be to specify relative URLs, change the base URL of the site I am turning into a static site and then generating “hard copy” static files in their “original” location. Am I correct in assuming that even though the directory the files are being placed into on the server will still work due to the use of relative URLs?

    C. A second option would be to use absolute URLs but download the generated static files to my desktop. Then I would de-activate the site in WordPress, put all of the files on the server and everything would just work. Correct?

    Is there another option? What would you recommend?

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  • Hi mikelbyl,

    Thank you for the kind words!

    So as far as best practices go, absolute URLs are slightly better than relative URLs because there are certain instances where you need to have absolute URLs (e.g. RSS feeds). So I’d opt for absolute URLs when possible.

    For transitioning from a WordPress site to a static site, my experience has only been with single-site installs. For that, what I’ve done is generate the static files into a directory, and then flip the domain from pointing from the directory for WordPress to the directory for the static files.

    To be honest I don’t have a lot of experience with WordPress multisite, but I’ll try setting up a multisite installation on my local dev box and see if I can come up with any better suggestions on how to migrate to a static site.

    Best,
    Scott

    Thread Starter mikelbyl

    (@mikelbyl)

    OK well then I think I’m going to try this:

    1. Save the site with absolute references in a correctly-named directory at the web root.

    2. See what happens without doing anything.

    3. “Deactivate” the site (puts it on ice, essentially) and notice if problems, if there were any, are solved.

    4. If there continue to be problems, it will be simple enough to delete the static folder and re-activate the WordPress site and try another approach.

    I’ll try and report back so you have a record of this for your users.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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