The “operations” perspective is the least important perspective on any marketing site/blog.
Design flexibility in production, marketing features and multi-author content production are the only thing that matters.
Gatsby is built by developers, for developers. And it’s hilariously out of touch with the needs of anybody else.
We’re almost 10 years into the static site ecosystem and there’s still no easy way to do even 1/10th of what Wordpress can do without building everything from scratch and duct taping it together with a rigid headless CMS in the middle.
It definitely isn't for the marketing sites and blogs I maintain. Site stability and reliability trump how convenient it is for marketing content creators to release changes. Better to have a site that doesn't have the latest change than a site that is completely down, or worse a site hacked because of a vulnerability in the CMS. Is that true for every site? Absolutely not! Although it seems like it would be for whitehouse.gov.
You’re optimizing for the wrong thing then. Content creation, driving traffic to the site, and converting that traffic is the harder, more important task.
Your role is the easiest, most trivial one.
On the spectrum of engineering problems, I’d place self driving cars and sentient AI somewhere on the right side labeled difficult.
On the left side of the scale, at the far edge labeled easiest, I’d place “keeping a wordpress site online.”
40% of the internet is powered by Wordpress, so I think a few hundred million people have figured it out.
On the other hand, 99% of all websites get little to no traffic. Maybe this is the difficult part you should be optimizing for instead?
Well, the sites I'm talking about get enough traffic that if they are down for a few minutes people notice, and a single wordpress server isn't enough to handle the traffic ;). If you have little to no traffic that's less of an issue.
[Edit] downvotes are fine but let's open up discussion.
Further edit, WP has great static content manager plugins. It's not direct to S3 but a single server can handle a lot of traffic in that mode.
The part that becomes significantly easier is updating that content or adding new ones. You don't need devops to rebuild and redeploy.
> The part that becomes significantly easier is updating that content or adding new ones. You don't need devops to rebuild and redeploy.
From my perspective as an SRE, that's actually a bad thing. I've seen content creators take down big parts of the site because they changed or deleted an asset. Most of the time that could have been caught by automated tests as part of a build pipeline, if one had been in place.
There is certainly a trade-off though. Wordpress and Drupal are great for quick turnaround content creation and editing. If you want your changes to be live as soon as you make them , Wordpress is better at that than a static site generator. On the other hand if you want rock-solid stability, and want any changes to go through a gamut of automated tests, Wordpress is not a good fit. It is possible, but it definitely isn't easy.
No, you aren’t. Wordpress has plugins to generate static html for all of the posts so visitors can be served without database hits.
are you suggesting to run it remotely? on even a small site the performance impact would be noticeable. also, you'd then be securing two systems instead of one