Top Hat Launches “Headless Hostman” for Static WordPress Sites

What is a Static Website?

Static websites are not actually a new thing. In fact, the early web was composed entirely of Static pages.

A Static Page just means the hosting server is loading a page with all images, text, and more already on the page.

This is different than the modern web ecosystem, which relies on databases to load content dynamically anytime a page is accessed.

That makes it:

1. Faster
2. Literally unhackable
3. Better at handling large volumes of traffic, especially spikes

Here’s a Full Static Historical Timeline

1. Early 1990s: Emergence of static websites with manually created HTML pages.
2. Late 1990s to early 2000s: Introduction of dynamic websites with server-side scripting languages like PHP, ASP, and databases to generate content dynamically.
3. 2010-2012: Rise of the headless CMS concept, with platforms like Contentful (founded in 2013) and Prismic (founded in 2013) popularizing the idea.
4. Mid-2010s: Growth of static site generators (SSGs) like Jekyll (released in 2008) and Hugo (released in 2013), enabling developers to build static websites with modern development workflows.
5. Late 2010s to early 2020s: Increasing adoption of new architectures, combining JavaScript, APIs, and Markup to build modern static and headless sites.

Calls for “Headless” WordPress Solutions

WordPress powers over 43% of the internet, so it wasn’t long before people were calling for “Headless” WordPress websites.

And for good reason.

WordPress is far beyond the most flexible and user-friendly tool for developing manageable, yet bespoke websites.

The common darkside of any content management system, especially WordPress, is that all the things that make it easy make it potentially vulnerable.

WordPress sites can often be victim to exploits and hackers due to their reliance on loading content from the database.

For a dev agency like us, we build a site with tailor-made code and a minimal stack of Plugins. We also put it on advanced hosting systems to mitigate attackers and insure they can never succeed in a full takeover. 

For other sites not built by us, this isn’t always the case.

Headless WordPress Should be Both

In theory, you’d manage your site like normal. Code, content, Plugins, etc all on WordPress.

Then, the final hosting server is totally disconnected from WordPress. Much like the 1990s web, it’s just serving HTML pages with all the content already on it.

Achieving this, however, is the challenge and we were shocked that there wasn’t a good solution.

We Built the Solution We Wanted to See

We don’t build something unless we can do it better. There’s really no reason.

We’ve tried every credible solution in the game trying to find something that suited our needs.

Here’s What We Tried

WP Engine’s Atlas Headless

As a long-time fan of WP Engine for traditional WordPress hosting, we had hope their “Headless” solution would be as intuitive.

We were shocked to discover that in order to use it, you must completely rebuild the frontend website in a JS framework.

This effectively means any WordPress site needs rebuilt, which we immediately knew most clients and projects wouldn’t go for. If you’ve invested time and resource into a site, there isn’t a budgetary justification for just rebuilding the whole thing.

Sure, if the project is meant to be Static from the get-go, you can do it, but most inquiries for Headless WordPress are for existing websites.

The Simply Static Plugin

The Simply Static Plugin showed promise.

It follows a similar philosophy as us — take the existing website and convert it for Static before deploying it to a Static Hosting platform.

We quickly found the flaws of the technical efforts behind the Plugin.

It requires you to set up Git and hosting all by yourself. For us, that’s no problem. For others, they would need developer intervention, effectively gatekeeping this service.

Beyond that, we found the Plugin didn’t work reliably. Builds to static were taking our test sites (of real client sites) hours to make it through. Beyond that, the Plugin attempted to download and transmit images, which put intense strain on the Staging server.

Introducing the Headless Hostman

Enter the Headless Hostman.

Built entirely in-house without any reliance on third-party code.

What the Headless Hostman Does

Takes Your Existing WordPress Site

Exactly where it’s at. No front-end rebuilds necessary.

Onboards It To Headless

During onboarding, we push your entire site to our Headless servr and prepare it in full so your team can easily manage it from there with the push of a button.

Puts the Power in Your Team’s Hands

It’s Content Independence.

Push a Single Page

Manage content and push the button when you’re done.

Smart Post Mapping

There’s one other big problem with traditional Static and even competitors.

If you, say, publish a Blog Post, you then have to go push every single page containing blog post listings.

This extends to your Custom Post Types, or any other dynamic content.

We’ve solved it with post mapping.

• Pick the post type
• Pick what needs to update when those posts are pushed

Push the Whole Thing

Your site is already living on Headless by now, in full.

We generally advise pushing singular pages — especially with post mapping — but in case you need a hard reset (in the case of a major site re-do or change), hit the button.

All Housed in an Intuitive Layout

Because we’re a design agency.

With Secure Ajax Routing

Without Ajax routing, a large chunk of native WordPress functions and Plugins won’t work.

We built secure Ajax routing. Requests hit the Static site, get vetted and cleaned, and then securely redirect back to your Staging site.

The Staging Site URL is never exposed in the process, protecting your site but allowing you the full power of WordPress.

This means 99% of WordPress functions and Plugins work out of the box.

All on the Best-in-Class Hosting Infrastructure

We host our Static Sites on Cloudflare.

Cloudflare is the industry leader in security, performance, and functionality.

It’s so good, that even competitors like WP Engine rely on it to power their networks.

Ready to Ride?

If you’re looking to convert your existing WordPress site in the superior practices of Static, let’s saddle up.

• Get Headless WordPress now