Overview

WordPress was not my first blog site. Previous to this I had used sPHPBlog and also Dokuwiki. sPHPBlog I liked, but it was rigid in its theme. I was also experimenting with wikis as well, hence Dokuwiki. I am not sure of the reasons I went with WordPress - probably popularity, ease of use, and the amount of plugins.

This worked well for a number of years, but then I changed....

• I was getting annoyed at the number of low life people out there were trying to break into WordPress.
• I was getting annoyed at the number of vulnerabilities posted for WordPress plugins there were - none of the ones luckily I was using - but it was only time.
• It was getting large for the amount of blogs contained on it.
• While I had auto-updates on, it still needed tending too every so often.
• I was using Markdown now, and while WordPress can accept markdown, refer to above issues.

So, I started a search for something different, and then came across Eleventy. This is what now powers this site.

WordPress

Here are the details of the running WordPress before I moved away from it. None of it was optimized.

NOTE: Backups is there for historical state. These don't really make up the overall size, but still consume space for the solution.

Anyway, lets say, ~1.8GB for the website, for 39 blog entries.

This yielded the following Lighthouse scores for mobile, and then desktop:

Static WordPress Site

So, the next iteration, was to turn WordPress into a static site. That will get rid of people able to hack the admin password as the backend does not exist. So, using the Static Website plugin for WordPress, I got it to create an export for me. First of course, I disabled comments and search.

This yielded me a 90MB static website for 39 blog entries.

This yielded a lightning page speed of the following (desktop, and then mobile renderings):

Only a slight increase in speed which was surprising, considering there was no language to interpret (PHP). This would speak to the output not being optimized.

Eleventy

While the comparison is not going to be 100%, due to removing some old blogs, these are the stats for the demo site. There are now 19 blog entries excluding this one.

Size of site: 2.3MB, or (754MB (HTML+SQL data) / 2.3MB) = 0.3% of the WordPress site.

Backups are done in Git, which means, I can get version control of it as well.

Not yet utilizing, but will look at some point:

• Different image sizes for different display size.
• Git pipelines to check-in, and then deploy.

Out of the box, I obtained the following (mobile, then desktop):

Update 21 Sept 2025 I have now updated the Eleventy website with a few additional features:

• Automatic selection of images based on the size of the device.
• Display correctly between mobile and desktop.
• Resolved issue with Accessibility so now get 100% across all aspects.

With dynamic images, site is now 4MB in size, or 0.53% of the WordPress data size; 4% of WordPress static size.

Update Oct 2025 More updates and streamlining. I now have:

• Website built into a docker container (incl web server).
• Minifying HTML, CSS and JS code - reduces network bandwidth.
• Compressing all assets with gzip and brotli using highest compression during build and stored in docker image - reduces network bandwidth.

So, with these changes, network bandwidth is significantly reduced. The size has now increased to around 9MB due to storing different formats of images (10% of WordPress static size, but network bandwidth significantly reduced).

Conclusion

Eleventy for the win. For the amount of blogs that I write, the size that it takes up, and the less issues of someone trying to hack me...its worth it!