In June, 2022, Elementor acquired Strattic, a company offering static hosting for WordPress sites. In this article, we're going to take a look at what Strattic does, how static hosting works, and why this aquirstion is great for those that create websites with Elementor and Elementor Pro.

Here's the launch announcement:

This comes only a few months after Elementor publicly launched Elementor Cloud, their own integrated hosting service built on Google Cloud infrastructure.

What Is Strattic By Elementor?

Strattic, now by Elementor, is a company that offers a turnkey solution designed to help creators statically host sites built on WordPress.

This tool takes your existing WordPress website and converts in into a static website. For there, it then offers you hosting and a management dashboard.

In essence, it gives the best of both worlds. A headless architecture (which comes with major speed and security benefits), while still allowing you to use WordPress as a CMS (so non-techies can still build and add content).

It also integrates directly into WordPress, making it easy for non-devs to implement, use and update a static WordPress site.

What Is Static Web Hosting (for WordPress)?

WordPress makes dynamic websites. When a path is requested, PHP generates the page, populating data from the SQL database into prebuilt templates (typically added by themes), and finally serves this page to the end user. This dynamic approach makes it easy to change pages such as archives, blogs, and other "dynamic" aspects of a website.

In simple terms, the page is made specifically for the user.

Static hosting is a different approach. Instead of that process mentioned above, pages are converted into prebuilt HTML, hosted and served to every single visitor. It's quicker and requires less resources because pages aren't being built on the fly. It's also more secure.

But traditionally, static websites are hard to update.

A modern approach to static hosting is "headless" or "jamstack". This adds a dynamic backend CMS to manage content. Every time new content is added, the static site is rebuilt and updated content is served to the end user.

Why Is Static Web Hosting Good For Elementor?

Elementor is a tool that beginners and developers alike can use to build incredible websites. It's easy, yet massively extendable, which is why it's the most popular page builder in the world.

However, to achieve this, the end code that Elementor outputs is pretty bloated compared to custom themes or even other builders, like Oxygen.

Without caching, this can cause pages to load slowly, and might give servers and browsers alike a struggle when it comes to rendering pages.

And that's the tradeoff that website creators have to make... potentially a slower site for a well designed, easy to use, but powerful website builder for WordPress, the best CMS in 2024.

However, static hosting removes the need to constantly render these heavier pages. And because of that, the speed concern is eliminated. Furthermore, I'd assume that the majority of Elementor sites aren't incredibly dynamic, and more like standard brochure corporate sites.

And that's why the Strattic acquisition by Elementor is really smart.

Why Is This Acquisition Smart?

Time will tell how Elementor will incorporate Strattic, but if the do it like they did Elementor Cloud, making it easy to rapidly deploy a static version of your site built with Elementor, it'll be incredible for end users. That's because they won't need to worry about the common speed optimization or security requirements that come with deploying WordPress websites.

Elementor itself won't need to minimize code (which is likely difficult without negatively impacting the usability of the builder or making breaking changes), because it would simply be fast.

And, they'd be leading the push on user-friendly Jamstack tools for non-developers, which is probably a pretty massive untapped market.

All in all, Elementors acquisition of Strattic has all of the hallmarks of an incredible deal.

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