WordPress to Static – Pushing the limits

Well this is not a kind of DIY or hands-on, but just a note on how I am doing it. The architecture of this portal.

The process is as follows

  1. Write an email with the subject having title and a signature, checksum of title plus a predefined string, separated by a double semicolon
  2. Send the same to a virtual id on CloudMailin.
  3. That is routed to an API Gateway, which triggers a lambda.
  4. Lambda (Node.js) evaluates the signature.
  5. If signature is valid, write email json into s3 bucket and triggers an EC2 spot instance with an EBS Volume attached.
  6. The user-data is injected with startup and delayed startup to pick and post the article from S3 into the WordPress on EBS
  7. Inline images are stripped and uploaded into the media manager, and links are replaced appropriately.
  8. Custom scripts utilizing mirror-website and other cli tools will convert the www.jijutm.com website to a static site
  9. WordPress has S3 support for Media Manager through a plugin.
  10. Downloads are directly uploaded into a download bucket.
  11. Then site is synced to s3 with proper expiry headers
  12. CloudFront is invalidated using the aws cli command.
  13. The services are stopped internally and EBS is unmounted
  14. Finally, the EC2 instance is terminated.

The EBS volume was prepared with the data, html and server configuration files. The spot instance is created from a custom ami which is updated time to time and provided to the lambda through environment variables.

This will run for me since I am the sole author of this blog, and my frequency of posting is very low hardly once in two months. For a high frequently updated portal or blog, this process may even fail totally and if there are more than one author, don’t even think of this. I do agree that there are too many cons, like preview editing, making changes etc are not there. But the most important part for me is this WordPress blog is rock solid, Not Hackable, unless AWS S3 or CloudFront is Hacked. Also page load times are pretty good, though tools like google lighthouse or webpage test are still suggesting more improvements.