Hello, Universe

I love WordPress. I’ve been using it since 2004 and it makes it easy to create blogs or general websites with dynamic content.

Back before WP, I used MoveableType, which was awesome but I forget the reason that made me switch. I think it was because I found WP more user-friendly than MT and just easier overall. I’m glad I made the switch since the plugins, themes, and community just make WP great to use for any type of site you want.

One thing about using WP is that search engines (I’m specifically talking Google here) actually know you’re using blog software, so it seems like they expect fresh content in order for you to continually rank high, at least that seems to be the case for me for my WP sites. I’ve never made a WP site that only used static pages, so I don’t know how those rank, but the ones I’ve made that are mixed static pages + posts don’t seem to stay up in the results unless I continually update them.

Back in 2007, I made a site about a video game that didn’t use WP since I thought that was overkill for a small site. It only consists of about 13 total pages and takes up less than 3 MB of disk space (probably less than 2.5 MB). The pages use PHP, but the content never changes and hasn’t changed much at all since 2007. I’m still ranking #1 in Google for broad matched terms like [character name] guide, [part of game title] guide, and #3 & #4 for [full game title] guide.

So this really makes me wonder if I’d just be better off not using WP and going back and creating sites manually again. In other words, using the Notepad++ & WYSIWYG HTML editor method. I guess it would depend on the topic. I think newsworthy topics that are constantly changing should use something similar to WP that allows you to add new content. But topics where there’s not really much to talk about should be static sites.

This is something I should do more testing with. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about since this year’s 30DC since the two topics I ended up choosing really have nothing really new & revolutionary about them and I think they would be better as websites with static pages instead of WP blogs.

Anyone have more experience with this? Have you found your result to be the same or different? Do your blogs keep their ranking better than your static sites? I’m really curious about this, so leave a comment!