Strattic, a static site generation and headless hosting platform, has been purchased by WordPress website builder Elementor. In an interview with The New Stack, Strattic founder Miriam Schwab said that Strattic started as an answer to the pain points all developers and marketers encounter when they use WordPress for their CMS.
“On one hand, it’s a platform that makes it easy to get up and running with a website that looks nice and does the job. But on the other hand, once it’s up and running, because it’s on a LAMP stack and has this processing server that’s running all the time, it can be a little bit unreliable,” Schwab said, adding that “you can have security issues, performance issues and scalability issues.”
Looking for a solution, Schwab became familiar with the emerging Jamstack trend. “Jamstack is more or less everything WordPress is not. Once the site is generated in Jamstack format, it’s just a collection of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Basically, there’s nothing to hack. It’s super fast. Everything’s pre-rendered scalable and fully CDN.”
Although a worthy alternative, Schwab felt that “WordPress is still the best CMS, best content management system, and marketers would have a hard time working with Jamstack because it’s more developer oriented. So what if we brought these worlds two worlds together? What if people could still use WordPress as usual, but it would be hidden from the internet, and you could click a button and generate a static replica?”
From there, as Schwab details in a blog post announcing the sale, she joined forces with co-founder Josh Lawrence and Strategic evolved from an idea into a viable product.
What’s Next for Strategic?
Strattic’s users won’t be seeing any major changes or new features with Elementor in the driver’s seat just yet, according to Schwab. However, it’s worth noting that Elementor recently debuted Elementor Cloud Website, an all-in-one software that offers WordPress web hosting and the drag-and-drop page builder that Elementor is known for.
With Strattic’s static rendering abilities, Elementor could significantly increase its hosting power and expand its reach to users who haven’t needed its services before.
Static hosting is a clever next step for Elementor. Some users have about Elementor’s speed, and with new page builders rolling out consistently vying for the top spot, it makes sense that Elementor is trying to stay ahead of the curve. Using static hosting will lighten the amount of frustration that comes with slow speeds — for now. Ultimately, Elementor will have to make more changes internally, but with Strattic in their toolkit it may not be long before we see significant improvements.
I asked Schwab why Strattic was such a good fit for Elementor and what separated it from comparable products in the WordPress market. “We are an end to end hosting and deployment platform,” she replied. “We host the WordPress site in a containerized and private environment, so only people with permissions can access it. And then they click a button and it generates a fully static, complete and perfect replica of the site — it looks the same, feels the same. But there’s nothing to hack.”
WordPress is Steering Towards Headless
Headless technology in the web development community has been gaining serious traction. Schwab says that we’re only at the tip of the iceberg. “If you look at recent conferences and events, you’ll see that a significant percentage of talks are about headless WordPress — people are very hungry to learn about it in the WordPress community. And I think that is because it solves certain pain points, and it does it in a really comprehensive way. I think that it just makes a lot of sense [and] that more and more people will start adopting this approach to web development, either with new sites or applying it to existing sites.”
Schwab said she continuously sees a cycle in the WordPress development community that she’s hoping Strategic and Elementor can stop. “Every year so a new platform will come around, and people will get excited about it. But then whatever it is ends up being more limited than WordPress, even if it solves those pain points. It doesn’t have the features and autonomy integrations. People get frustrated with that and say, ‘Okay, never mind, back to WordPress.'”
“WordPress is here to stay,” said Schwab. “So let’s try to support it and make it better by creating innovative solutions around it. What we’re doing for WordPress itself is making it more appealing to developers and users in general.”
Strattic, now by Elementor, is a product that is intended to “bridge the gap between WordPress and these more modern approaches to web development like Jamstack,” according to Schwab. “Rather than saying it’s either/or, we’re saying they can all live together really well and bring a lot of value to people.”
