Is using a static site generator feasible for a 50 page website?

Question

WordPress has been great, but I want to simplify and speed up my website and remove the db component required. Since most of my pages don't change that often, I thought moving it to a static site generator would be a good choice.

I have no experience with them, and I spent a lot of time researching different options. http://middlemanapp.com/ looks like a good one even though I have zero Ruby experience.

Question 1. Does it make sense to manage a 50+ page site with a static site generator? Question 2. Is there any sort of gain of using a js/node-based generator vs. a ruby generator?

Answer 1

Assemble is exactly for this purpose, it's very easy to use (compared to other solutions), and it runs on Grunt

Answer 2

I'm one of the maintainers of Middleman. 50 pages is not much at all - I have several sites with hundreds of pages, and it works great. Definitely for a personal blog it'll do fine. A site with thousands of pages that changes frequently would definitely see slow builds, though - Middleman does a lot, and some of what it does is ugly, slow black magic. I'd encourage you to try it out and see - there are Wordpress-migration tools intended for use with Jekyll which will work well to get your posts out and into Markdown, and from there you can just experiment.

Answer 3

Question 1.

I had a very bad experience (project had to be cancelled after one week of work) trying to migrate a small website but with a lot of content from Wordpress to Middleman. The main issue was that the content (book reviews) were updated daily and consisted of thousands of records which caused the site generation builds to be extremely slow.

We also had problems with pagination of different types of resources (Middleman only supports pagination of blog posts).

Features like "Random posts" had to be taken away as the content is static.

So it was not about the number of pages but about the content itself (size, domain complexity and change frequency) which caused the project to fail. Middleman is great for not data intensive with relatively simple data domains, like for example personal or company websites, blogs or simple catalogues.

If you are running a WP site try debugging the problems you may be facing (like performance, code maintenance, etc.) and fixing them instead of rewriting the whole website. If the database is slow try creating indexes, caching responses, etc.

Question 2.

There is any sort of gain in my opinion.