Certskills.com Site Update – March, 2026

This post is for you regular users of Certskills.com. We just completed a fairly major update of the site! But most of the changes are hidden from you.

In this post, I’ll let you know what to expect with the changes. Also, as with any big change, there might be issues – so if you see things that look like an error, leave me a comment, so I can find and fix.

On to the detail!

This site uses blogging software called WordPress. WordPress has been one of the most popular blogging platforms for decades – so when I started my original blog site (domain name www.ccnaskills.com, which turned into www.certskills.com around 2012), I chose WordPress. And I still use WordPress.

The blog(s) changed over the years to meet the needs of whatever I was doing. For a time, I was writing products ranging from introductory textbooks, through CCNA, CCNP, and CCIE. So the site gave me a place to supply some related content. Eventually, I focused the site on CCNA, which is where it sits today – and where it will likely stay until I, well, stop. 🙂

Now let’s talk about that future, starting with the platform change.

WordPress, as a blogging platform, has been great for me in many ways. But by the mid 2020’s, for my purposes, it has become a problem. As IT folks, you might find it interesting.

WordPress, as a software package, requires software updates, of course. But WordPress does not provide 100% of what a typical Blog site needs – it is built to allow and expect other software to be added. Several vital components, such as the theme, are software packages that also require updates. Other features, like security, anti-spam, comments, and the list goes on, require additional software called plugins.

Over the years, the site has needed more and more plugins. Each has increased its rate of software updates. The same effects happen with WordPress and the theme software, and oftentimes with the need to act quickly so the site remains secure.

Certskills.com has always been a free-to-use site, with minimal unobtrusive ads. Not a complaint – it’s my site and my choice. (Many people have suggested I charge for the service, or add more upfront ads, but I’ve not gone there.) But the site has operated at a loss. It wasn’t a big deal at a small loss, but the cost has gone up dramatically. For instance, five years ago, it might have taken three hours to apply maintenance and confirm it worked, with a need to do that maybe once or twice a year. Now it’s three hours to start, and every time, due to the increased complexity of software interactions, we uncover software incompatibilities and installation scripts that break one or more components. Then a few days of support calls and troubleshooting – with the need to run this cycle 3-4 times a year. It costs time and real money (I farm out the heavy WordPress work to a company with the right expertise).

Over the last year, I thought long and hard about this site. Was it time to pack it in and be done with it? Just shut the site down now? Go the other way, and migrate totally away from WordPress to something that’s more economical and supportable – but with a loss in features? Or some other option? All options other than shutting it down would cost time and money, but which would be best? My Web support company and I talked it through more than a few times and came up with a plan, which we just rolled out.

What we’ve done is keep WordPress – but hide it from you. Behind the scenes, we run a static site generator which processes the WordPress site to create a set of static HTML pages – an exact replica of the site. Then, we run certskills.com as a simple website using that static content.

First, from your perspective, as the user, some things get better, some different, some possibly worse. But there’s one big improvement:

• FASTER! The static site runs much faster. In the old days, WordPress dynamically created each page after you clicked. Now, when you click on a new page, the page already exists – it’s just a matter of downloading the page. The old site wasn’t slow, but the new site is definitely faster.

As part of the transition, I also cleaned up the menus and content. I did that before migrating to the static site. Of note:

• CCNA Scope: Technology content is within the scope of CCNA, with other topics removed
• Removed Too-Old Content: Really old content removed
• Focused the Content: Removed content that might have been useful in years past, but that is now outside the scope of CCNA
• Menus: Revised Menu system focused on labs, videos, and exercises

Worse? Yeah. Comments take a one-time hit. We still have a comments feature, but I had to lose all the existing comments.

To make this transition to a static site, I had to revamp the comments function. It looks the same (same backend tool, called Disqus). But I couldn’t migrate the comments. So all existing comments are gone. New comments should be maintained from here forward. There are some other improvements in the comments, like you can sort to see either the newest or the oldest comments on a post (couldn’t do that before). But losing all existing comments is the primary downside of the migration.

I won’t bore you with the research and thinking that led to the final choice. But what we’ve done is to keep WordPress, but users can no longer reach the WordPress site. Instead, we use this process:

Development Site (WordPress): Add content to the WordPress site, but don’t allow users to access it.

Generate a Static Site: Use tools to generate static HTML pages based on the WordPress site.

Publish the Static Site: Publish the static version of the site as the www.certsksills.com website. IT’S NOT RUNNING WORDPRESS. So, the WordPress software packages that seem to have weekly updates aren’t exposed to the entire Internet, so there’s no compelling need to spend time and energy updating them so often. We can wait, probably for years, before having to spend the time and money to go through a software update cycle. Hopefully, this option will be a lot cheaper to operate.

Using a static site while keeping the content in WordPress solved a couple of huge problems for me and made the transition pretty seamless for all of you. You see the same content and the same page layout, with almost no outward change to the site’s look and feel. Hooray for you!

For me, I did not have to migrate hundreds of blog posts to a new platform – a process that I estimated would take me 300-400 hours. Also, with this strategy, WordPress software updates will be needed only every few years, rather than every few months. So I can afford to keep running the site. Hooray for me!

Final word – if you see something that looks off, leave me a comment and tell me about it. That will help me find and fix any potential issues with the migration. Or just leave me a comment and tell me what’s on your mind!