Is WordPress overkill for a simple static website?

[asim18]

Someone needed a very simple website done with five totally static pages.

Because the site was so simple I thought I'd experiment by laying it out using Wordpress. I've got to grips with it and have managed to get a website looking exactly like I want....

But it seems pretty bloated.

I know for a fact that I could have coded from scratch exactly the same layout and it would have taken 30-50 sparse lines of code per page. Wordpress is using over 700 fully dense lines of code per page, and not to mention reading from a DB.

I think there's just too much going on in WordPress. I see almost every basic website using WordPresss these days, and I wonder how many server resources could be saved by using bespoke coding.

 

[asim18]

A fair point. I can see how it's appealing to know that your client can update their website like how they update Facebook

 

[asim18]

Wow. WP folder was 120MB, after hand-coding everything (admittedly with a little help from some bits of pre-coded JS) site is now 1.7MB in total and using absolutely no server time. Looks a lot better too as there were some layout things which weren't possible/very hard to do in WP with its million lines of redundant CSS.

Some interesting things mentioned though, I will read up on them, thanks to all.

As for Worpress in particular, I doubt I'll be interested in becoming a WP guru any time soon. To sum it up, otherwise easy tasks are much more complicated to accomplish in return for some hard things which are made very easy.