Backup your Wordpress and serve it as a static website

A few months ago I started migrating all my projects and websites into AWS. The last thing standing was my old wordpress blog (hosted at mastergenius.net, not alive anymore). Today, I decided to make a final backup and create a static version out of it and ditch the VPS I have running just for that.

It turned out to be extremely easy :)

Backup all content

Apart from serving the content as static website I wanted to have the posts in a form that can be easily imported later back in Wordpress and also a format which is easy to parse and read using a text editor.

I just wanted the text, which is the heart of any article anyway, so I just did the usual export feature of Wordpress as described in the official export documentation.

A full folder copy is recommended too, you know just in case I want to revisit any files, images or code!

Serve as static website

There are a lot of ways to dump an active wordpress installation and several plugins that allow you to do this conversion easily. I just took the simplest way and used the well-known wget Linux command line tool (original Quora question link with the command is in the References section).

wget -k -K  -E -r -l 10 -p -N -F --restrict-file-names=windows -nH http://active-wordpress.domain.com

After executing the above command I deleted all the unnecessary files, stripping down the whole site in some MBs.

I just uploaded the static files to Amazon Simple Storage Service - S3 and that’s all!

Zero-cost hosting :)

References