WordPress is the most popular blogging software today, powering a majority of the top one hundred blogs. Like many of the systems that are popular nowadays, it’s dynamic. The server pieces together pages on the fly when they are requested, pulling content from the database, processing it, and wrapping a template around it before sending to the user’s browser.
Back in the earlier days of blogging, things were different. Most of the popular content management systems that blogs ran on were static page generators, like Movable Type, the package that previously held WordPress’s throne, before a price increase caused a mass exodus in 2004. Movable Type stores your content in a database, like WordPress, and it has an administration panel where you manage your content and adjust settings. But that’s where the similarities end. Instead of assembling pages dynamically, the blog engine compiles them into static HTML pages ahead of time, so the web server can just throw them back to users instantly. It’s a lot easier on the server that way, which can result in a snappier web site and less chance of your site going down from a social media bump.
This is, of course, something of a simplification. Many WordPress users, especially those with larger sites, use caching plugins like W3 Total Cache to have the best of both. The dynamic model is used, but frequently-accessed pages are statically cached for performance.
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