WordPress has gotten too bloated and much too slow. What to do?
Over the last year I've been on a quest to dump WordPress. That's because all my websites take forever to load. Going lean with WordPress never seemed to work well for me. That involved a lean theme (Astra) and minimal plugins. Still, I wasn't nearly satisfied.
The solution to my problem involved dumping WordPress and going with HTML and Javascript. Unfortunately, that is easier said than done. I found most website builders unacceptable because I had to host my websites with them. What happens when I want to leave? Well, I'm out of luck. Other website builders were too expensive. Bootstrap Studio was inexpense but the learning curve was seriously steep and everything was difficult. Open source CMS programs also had too steep of a learning curve, and I would have had to hire a theme/template builder. I did find one open source CMS program for free called GRAV. It was pretty fast and the learning curve wasn't too steep. It used flat files instead of a database, and it used a markdown language. However, I was still struggling with theme issues. I was also looking at Fiverr to get someone to just build a simple website for me. I was about to settle on GRAV when I ran across the website builder called Nicepage.
Note: If you want to install GRAV, just download a free GRAV Skeleton which is populated with a few pages to get you going. Just upload the unzipped files and folders. To install just go to your site. Done.
Nicepage is a website builder that you can download and install on your desktop. You can try it free for one website with up to 5 pages. I went ahead and bought the personal version for $59. That allows me to create up to 5 different websites with unlimited pages each. If you purchase it, you have 30 days to get your money back if not satisfied.
For my first website (this one), I snooped through the templates until I found something I could work with. Then I used Nicepage to change some of the pictures and I edited the text. It was pretty easy to use, but let me explain the big picture:
A page is divided up into blocks and blocks have options for columns. This method is used for rearrangement purposes on different devices, like desktop and mobile. How should the webpage rearrange itself when going from desktop to mobile? You add a series blocks to create a webpage. Within each block you may need to define columns and then work within each column. Finally, before outputing the results you need to view the page on varios devices and make adjustments for each device.
Nicepage outputs all the items necessary for a website. You just need to upload everything to your host using an ftp program, like FileZilla.
I got this (initial) website up and working in a day. However, I wanted a blog and Nicepage only does blogs for WordPress and Joomla. You can tell Nicepage which type of output you want: HTML, WordPress, Joomla, image and project. I always select HTML. Anyway, a blog is really just a series of pages that link to one page - called Blog. So I just created one blog post and duplicated it for all the pages that I needed. Then I created the Blog page where I put a thumbnail, short text and link to each blog post. Now I have a blog. Each new page will require adding a reference to the Blog page. Given that speed of loading is the most important factor for me, Keeping things simple and in HTML is the way to go.
The home page of this blog loads pretty fast - within a second or two. The outstanding issue revolves around pictures. Put lots of big pictures on a page and loading gets slowed down. No surprise there. But what can I do about it? I can lower the resolution of the pictures. I'm not sure how to cache the pictures for faster loading. Anyway, I'll be looking into it in the future.
Update: Turns out that my nicepage.css file was over 1M. I used PurifyCSS to cut the size of the file in half. That noticeably helped. Next is Squoosh to compress my images.
Generally, Nicepage is super easy to use. At first you'll have to snoop around a little to find things. Nicepage does have some videos showing how to get started. The price ($59) is reasonable. There are thousands of webpage templates to get you started. The only real outstanding issue is support. Here is where Nicepage is lacking. If you run into problems then the support team may be a little slow getting back to back to you, according to other people. I didn't need Nicepage support, so I didn't have a problem. I'm used to using Google to solve my support issues.
I suggest trying the free version for a little testing, then get the paid version if interested. Once you buy it you'll have 30 days to thoroughly test it out. You can get your money back within 30 days if you don't like it.