The vast majority of sites on the web today use content management systems. The benefits are obvious: they remove the need to tangle with code, make it easy for non-technical people to run a site, and usually provide all the extensions you could ever need for adding functionality.
But, for all those benefits, there’s something of a trade-off. Content management systems like Joomla! and WordPress are dynamic site generators. Every time a user requests a page, it is generated on the fly. There are various ways of doing this, but the most common method — and the one used by WordPress — is by executing PHP code and making database requests. From a functionality perspective, that’s incredibly powerful, but the downside is that each stage in generating a page takes time. Compared to static sites, where everything is pre-made, dynamic sites can be slow — and that’s bad for users and for conversions. Read more »