The Simply Static plugin generates a static version of your website. It combs through your database and creates html versions of every post and page and creates a zip file that you can either use to archive your site or deploy on your server, a static host service or a CDN (Content Delivery Network). Static sites are extremely fast, since no database is used, and extremely secure. But they are static, meaning nothing can be changed. If you want to change something, you will need to go back to your dynamic WP site on the Commons and regenerate the zip file and archive it again, or redeploy.

So, for example, you can set up a free account on a service such as Netlify, deploy your zip file and have a free static version of your site up and running. Or you could decide the publish/archive your site on CUNY’s Manifold instance. Or you can just make a copy of your site as it was at a certain point in time.

As Simply Static is creating the static pages, it will automatically replace the URLs for the WordPress installation with either (a) absolute URLs, at a domain of your choice or (b) relative URLs, so you can host the static files on any domain or (c) URLs constructed for offline use, so you can browse the site locally on your computer.

Here is a screenshot of Simply Static’s dashboard.