Prerequisites
wget must be installed on your computer. To check this, in your Terminal or Command Prompt, enter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dopQWKDB0lUPuzzles for Adults, Seniors, and TeensThe solutions can be found going in any direction: up, down, forwards, backwards, and diagonally.
Any words containing a space will be compressed into one word.
If wget is installed, you will see something like:
If wget is not installed, you will see something like:
Bluehost has a good article on how to install wget on Linux, Mac, and Windows (here is a link to GNU Wget).
My Mac did not have wget installed. I installed wget using Homebrew.
Prepare the Website
To save work later, disable plugins that will likely interfere with a working static website. Usually this means deactivating or disabling plugins and features that will not convert well.
For the website that I used to test this, I actually did it twice. The first time to download the website and find mistakes. The second time was to remove mistakes that affect every page (a table of contents made by a WordPress plugin). I did this by deactivating plugins and features. Then I converted the WordPress site to a local static site again.
Convert the WordPress website to a Static Website
In your command prompt/terminal, go to the folder on your computer where you want the static website to be installed.
Run this command after changing “https://your-wordpress-site.com” to the URL of the WordPress website you want to convert:
wget --mirror --convert-links --adjust-extension --page-requisites --no-parent https://your-wordpress-site.com
Wait. It might take several minutes to complete.
Test the local static website, so that it works correctly. Fix any issue you find, like non-working links. These are usually links that were previously created by WordPress plugins.
In my case, after deactivating some of the WordPress website features, I then converted the WordPress site a static site again.
If you want to upload the static website to the web, upload it like you would any other website to the internet. I usually ZIP the local website and upload the ZIP file. Sometimes, I will use FTP to upload the website.
Now you see how easy it is to use wget to flatten a WordPress website.