Renegade Ranking Engine #2
Building And Hosting A Static Site With CloudFlare, GitHub, And Hugo
This is the second post in The Renegade Ranking Engine series. You can read the first one here
To begin to understand how the Renegade Ranking Engine works, we first need to understand how a traditional WordPress blog delivers content.
A visitor requests a webpage, and the WordPress software then fetches the content from the database and loads all of the elements of the page such as the header, body, and footer.
It then puts all this together and returns an HTML page, and unless there is some kind of caching in place, it does this every time that page is requested.
But that is only the beginning of the process.
When the visitor’s browser receives the HTML file it then has to go and fetch all of the resources that are referenced in it, such as CSS files, images, javascript libraries, fonts, etc.
During this fetching process, the page is rendered in the visitor’s browser, and depending on how well the page is designed, the page may jump around as images are loaded in place etc.
Now, if the creator of the site has been particularly clever, they will have put their site behind CloudFlare which will cache the HTML file and other resources and serve them from a server close to the visitor.
This really is the best solution for a typical WordPress blog and it will get you high scores in Lighthouse. But nowhere good enough to boost your rankings.
The thing is, WordPress and other content management systems are slow and bloated. The pages they generate are bloated, and unless you build a theme from scratch, and install a pile of plugins which in my opinion are a huge security risk, then as your pages loads, images will pop in and the page will bounce up and down, fonts will change, responsive elements will kick in and alter the layout, and ultimately you will have a page that doesn’t comply with Google Web Vitals.
And that was the starting point for this project.
I have always wanted to get rid of WordPress, and this is where we begin…
Let’s build The Renegade Ranking Engine...
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