What do you have to build without WordPress?
There is no database, no admin and no plugins behind this page. That did not remove the work; it moved it from run time to build time.
Let me start with what is not an argument: I build and maintain WordPress sites, and on most jobs that is the right answer. This decision is about this one site — the one with a single editor, and that editor works in a code editor.
What disappears with the system
There is no database, so there is nothing to back up and nothing to restore. There is no admin, so there is no login to break into. There are no plugins, so there is no update stream that could move on its own.
The editing interface goes with them. Anyone other than me who wants to write on this page has to open the source. That is the most expensive item on the list, and on most sites it closes the question by itself.
What takes its place
What a content management system gives you for free has to be written here. Search, sharing images, the sitemap, the checks, the deploy — each one a custom tool in the repository.
- what reaches the site6,575 linesstylesheet and scripts
- what stays in the repository7,137 linessearch index, sharing images, sitemap, checks, deploy
not one line of the tools runs on the server
The ratio is the interesting part: the tools come to roughly as much code as the site itself — and not one of their lines reaches the server. This is the item a content management system hides: the same work exists there too, it just gets done at run time, on every single request.
Search is the clearest example
In a content management system search comes with the box: there is a form for it, and the server queries the database. Without one, two things have to be built. An index builder that turns the pages' text into word stems, and a client that downloads that index when the search is first opened.
The result can do something a database search cannot: the answer needs no server. In exchange, stemming has to be solved separately for Hungarian and for English, and the index has to move with the content — if I forget to rebuild it, the search finds yesterday's site.
What the visitor sees of all this
Nothing. That is the correct answer, and it is also the measure. What is measurable: the home page is around forty-three thousand bytes, the response is in tenths of a second, and to render it the browser contacts no third-party server at all.
When it is the wrong choice
When the content is not written by whoever writes the code. At a clinic where the price list changes weekly and several people edit it, this whole arrangement is useless — there the editing interface is the product, and a content management system is exactly what provides it.
So the decision turns on one question: who edits the content, and how often? That is what what I build with is about, and so is the piece on the absence of a build step.
Questions on this topic
Why isn't your own site on WordPress, when you build WordPress sites?
Because the decision turns on one question: who edits the content, and how often. This page has one editor, and that editor works in a code editor — the editing interface isn't missing here. On a job where the client writes the copy, the same question leads to the other answer.
What does a site lose without a content management system?
The editing interface first of all, and that is the most expensive item: anyone who wants to write on it has to open the source. Then the plugin ecosystem: what would be one click elsewhere has to be written here. In exchange there is no database, no login and no update stream that can move on its own.
How much work is it to build a content management system's features by hand?
On this site it is measurable: the tools for search, sharing images, the sitemap, the checks and the deploy come to roughly as much code as what reaches the site itself. The difference is that not one line of it runs on the server — all of it is settled at build time.
Is a site without a database more secure?
There is less to attack: no login, no database query, no plugin whose flaw you have to wait out. That does not make it untouchable — the hosting, the DNS and the email are still there, and most real trouble arrives through those today.