WP Static Exporter for Cloudflare Pages

Export your WordPress site as plain HTML and deploy it to Cloudflare Pages in minutes — no build tools, no CI/CD, no server required.

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What it does

WP Static Exporter crawls your WordPress site from the inside and produces a fully self-contained folder of plain .html files with all assets — ready to drag into Cloudflare Pages Direct Upload.

No external services. No API keys. No CLI. Just install, configure, click Export, and download a ZIP.

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Features

• Full site crawl — Homepage, all published Pages, Posts, custom post types, category and tag archives
• Asset bundling — Theme CSS, JavaScript, images (inline, srcset, CSS background-image), web fonts
• Uploads folder — Entire wp-content/uploads/ directory is included
• Smart URL rewriting — All internal links are rewritten to root-relative paths
• Dev domain scrubbing — Removes hardcoded local/staging URLs (e.g. http://site.local) from HTML, meta tags, OG tags, JSON-LD, and inline styles
• CSS url() safe handling — Inline background images in style="" attributes are rewritten with single quotes to prevent HTML attribute corruption
• Clean output — WordPress admin, login, feed, comment, and trackback URLs are excluded
• One-click ZIP download — Output is packaged and ready to upload to Cloudflare

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Screenshots

Admin page	Export in progress	Download ready
Settings and site overview	Live progress bar with status messages	One-click ZIP download with export log

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Requirements

Requirement	Minimum
WordPress	5.8+
PHP	7.4+
PHP ZipArchive extension	Required (available on virtually all hosts)
WordPress accessible via HTTP	Required during export (no server-level password protection)

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Installation

Option A — Upload via WordPress admin (recommended)

1. Download the latest release ZIP
2. Go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin
3. Select the ZIP and click Install Now
4. Click Activate Plugin

Option B — Manual install

cd /path/to/wp-content/plugins/
git clone https://github.com/waltermazzariol/wp-static-exporter.git

Then activate via Plugins → Installed Plugins.

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Usage

1. Configure dev URL scrubbing (important)

If your site was built on a local domain (e.g. http://mysite.local, http://localhost), go to Tools → Static Exporter → Settings and add that URL to the Additional local / dev URLs to scrub field.

This is necessary because SEO plugins (Yoast, RankMath) store the dev URL in the database and embed it in og:image, twitter:image, and other meta tags. The exporter scrubs these automatically once you declare the dev domain.

http://mysite.local

Both http:// and https:// variants are scrubbed automatically from a single entry.

2. Export

Go to Tools → Static Exporter and click ⚡ Start Export.

The exporter will:

1. Collect all public URLs
2. Fetch each page and download all referenced assets
3. Rewrite internal links to relative paths
4. Scrub all declared local/dev URLs
5. Copy the wp-content/uploads/ folder
6. Package everything into a dated ZIP file

Click ⬇ Download ZIP when complete.

3. Deploy to Cloudflare Pages

1. Go to Cloudflare Dashboard → Pages → Create a project → Direct Upload
2. Unzip the downloaded archive
3. Drag the unzipped folder into the upload area
4. Click Deploy site
5. Configure your custom domain under Custom domains

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What gets exported

✅ Included	❌ Excluded
Homepage	/wp-admin
All published Pages	/wp-login
All published Posts	/wp-cron
Custom post types (public)	xmlrpc.php
Category archives	Feed URLs (/feed)
Tag archives	Comment and trackback URLs
Theme CSS & JavaScript	WordPress query-string URLs (?p=, ?s=, etc.)
Images (inline, srcset, CSS backgrounds)
Web fonts referenced in CSS
Full wp-content/uploads/

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Limitations

Static HTML cannot run server-side code. The following will not work after export:

• Search — requires PHP. Replace with Pagefind (static search) or Algolia.
• Contact forms — replace with Formspree, Netlify Forms, or a Cloudflare Worker.
• Comments — replace with Disqus or Giscus.
• WooCommerce / eCommerce — not compatible with static export.
• User login / membership areas — not compatible.

Everything purely content-based (text, images, CSS animations, JavaScript UI interactions) works perfectly.

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Project structure

wp-static-exporter/
├── wp-static-exporter.php        # Plugin bootstrap and constants
├── includes/
│   ├── class-exporter.php        # Core crawl, asset download, URL rewriting, ZIP
│   ├── class-admin.php           # Admin menu page and settings
│   └── class-ajax.php            # AJAX handler for the export request
└── assets/
    ├── admin.css                 # Admin UI styles
    └── admin.js                  # Progress bar and AJAX trigger

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How it works

The exporter runs entirely inside WordPress — no headless browser, no external crawler.

1. URL collection — queries WordPress for all public post types, terms, and the homepage via standard WP functions (get_posts, get_categories, get_tags, etc.)
2. Page fetch — each URL is fetched via wp_remote_get() from the live WordPress instance
3. Asset processing — the HTML is parsed with regex to find <link>, `