WordPress Alternatives: Custom Static Site Generators

I don’t pay for hosting anymore. I work locally and deploy the static version of my site to Cloudflare Pages.

I also stopped relying on plugins and started building my own custom theme. None of that would’ve been possible without AI.

Recently, I wanted to create a website for a domain I own but didn’t feel like spinning up a full WordPress instance for it. So I went with plain HTML pages. The problem was I didn’t want to copy-paste the same header, footer, hero, and call-to-action sections across every single file, so I started injecting those dynamically with PHP.

From there I built a build.php file to automate the whole thing: generating pages, creating sitemaps, assigning the project a specific port, handling Tailwind integration and pushing the site to GitHub.

After a few tweaks here and there, I basically ended up with a stripped-down version of Hugo.

But it works, It does exactly what I need and nothing else.

I started with a simple idea and kept refining it along the way using GitHub Copilot.

I haven’t tackled things like converting Markdown to HTML yet, but honestly, I’ve learned a ton just getting this far.

Why Choose a Custom SSG over WordPress?

As for the Why: it’s exceedingly simple… because I can.

Creating a WordPress instance with Podman is a piece of cake.

Having said that, if a site is just a few pages, setting up a full WordPress instance is complete overkill.

Since this is small website project (less than 50 pages), GitHub Copilot and Google Antigravity understand the codebase really well, which makes customizing and creating things a lot easier.