I doubt it will move significantly in that direction. Sure, some will look into that, but I suspect most people will just find an alternative, accept the lower quotas or stop blogging.

I think a huge majority blogging on WordPress.com have no interest in learning the tech stack to run something like Hugo. The quick start for Hugo includes command line git, which will probably make 99% of bloggers stop reading.

(n-gate.com seems to have died, but the prediction that WordPress.com bloggers would switch to static site generators and use git for version control would probably qualify as an example of the comical HN-bubble.)

There is also Publii ( https://getpublii.com/ ) which is like a desktop app where you write your posts in, and then you can hit a "publish" button and it will deploy. Deployment (afair) can be one of the well-known names like Digital Ocean, or a simple FTP access to whatever shared hosting you rented.

The procedure can't get a lot less technical, and for some people this may be the right thing. Plus, since it's a SSG basically, there is not much to worry about vulnerabilities.

I tried it briefly and decided it's not for me (don't exactly remember which drawbacks killed it for me), but I think the approach has some value to it in general.

I actually run a local instance of Wordpress and then use the Simply Static plugin to generate a static site that I host on Netlify. Works great for me.

It's much harder to get email subscriptions going on Hugo as compared to WP. Ghost might be a better option, I feel.

for static sites to take off, they need a comparable usability to wordpress. currently there is to much technical friction for the common user. no wysiwyg editors for posts/pages, no point and click customization for layouts, no easy asset management, the requirement for git and a build environment.

They'll just used managed services from providers, publishing SaaS products that seem to be bundled with retail domain offerings, or something like Squarespace.

I'm hosting one in AWS and my monthly bill is only like $10/mo but I have other stuff running too. Static S3 with a codebuild pipeline so all I have to do is commit markdown to GH when I want to post. Here's a writeup on how I set it up. http://blog.bytester.net/posts/about-blog/

I like Hugo (or Jekyll) in combination with Netlify. I can just write something and push it to my GitHub repository. That's it.

I have a site in Jekyll, but the tech stack is moving all the time and causes compilation errors. I’m not a Ruby dev, so I can’t compile my Jekyll site anymore, it was something along the lines of being programmed for Ruby 3.x while Ruby 4 is the default now, or something similar.

I switched to Hugo for this reason.

People use WP because it is easy to use. Almost WYSIWIG. Static sites are great but they have much steeper learning curve.

Static site generators often require prerendering and dynamic content so, no won't work without ssr.

I switched from WP to Hugo 5 years ago, and am very happy with that decision. Now, if only there were a good and simple Web UI for it so I could switch my wife and daughter's blogs over, I could ditch WP and PHP altogether.

Have you tried Hugo with NetlifyCMS? I've been pretty happy with that combo on a few small sites I run. Here's a starter: https://github.com/netlify-templates/one-click-hugo-cms

I've looked at it, but I won't consider a cloud service\, and while it is open-source, the dependency hairball to self-host Netlify is rather intimidating.