Selfhosted

If you want something boring, use a static site generator like Hugo. But you already said you found them restrictive

I built my previous site with Ruby Mustache, an extremely simple templating thing. But I abandoned it because it got hard to maintain.

My current site is plain HTML and CSS. This is the way if you want ultimate customizability. It works pretty good and I would recommend it. Simpler is better.

Remember: Having a website was one of the ways people communicated on the net back in the day. HTML and CSS are intended to be used by regular people, they are very easy to learn. Don't be scared of them

There is no decent WYSIWYG html editor i know of

My site

Git repo for my current site

Plain text HTML.

yeah i was also using hugo and free hosting with github pages, I recommend Hugo or Jekyl as you can host for free in a github repo.

but think twice, the internet is dying, people use social network 5 to 10h a day, dont read blogs and use AI chat more and more. A blog yes but maybe not public anymore, you feed tons of AI Bots and you compete against AI generated blog and avatar.

this page list a lot more issues https://www.waltercedric.com/posts/leaving/

Good luck!

I would recommend learning basic HTML CSS and making a website without external tools. This way the maintenance cost is 0 as your website will likely work forever.

Write all your HTML first then your CSS, it will be easier this way. Use vanilla JS if you need to but avoid external libraries , same for php.

Hugo or similar

You dont say what kind of website it is, just not blog or documentation style.

But SSGs can be skinned a bunch if different ways, and have been set up for a bunch of different purposes.

https://github.com/myles/awesome-static-generators

I have been using Zola for myself lately, its less blog post and more article oriented, but still doc heavy. I like the duckquill theme (with... More than a few changes, but still), which I doubt fits what you want. For comparison, here is duckquill: https://duckquill.daudix.one/

But you may like the Portio theme: https://quentin-rodriguez.github.io/portio-zola/

If you don't need to update often though, I think some basic html could be the way to go rather than using an ssg.

https://html5up.net/ if it is a single landing page. Just grab a template and edit its content to your liking.

Publii if it is some kind of blog or has a few subpages.

"Nice" is entirely subjective. I think my site is nice, but someone else might think it's garbage.

I use Hugo to generate my site. It's not wysiwyg, but it supports markdown for pages, which is even simpler than html. It also has a live server mode, where you can see changes immediately.

The community has a created whole gallery of themes (templates) that you can use. It might be worth looking through the gallery to see if you think any of them look "nice" to you.

Just a few minutes ago I learned about neocities.org. At first glance it looks like it might do what you want.

Quarto and Docusaurus are for documentation. You may be looking for a more general static site generator like 11ty.

Publii is probably what you want. It's a GUI similar to WP/SquareSpace, but it spits out static pages.

Static site generators. Jekyll, Hugo, etc. Pick a template, write in markdown.

You have several conflicting needs there. Why not just continue using Wordpress but without the weird extensions?

Wordpress to static, i like gutenberg, there are prob many easier ways for a static web page. IK runtipis appstore has a few.

The closest you're probably going to get to a half decent looking WYSIWYG editor is something templatized top to bottom. Odoo, Ghost...things like that.

Build a website on your preferred platform, you're already using WP.

Create a static version of it. There's plugins for exactly that purpose.

Put the static files on a web host, I use s3, but you can use whichever you prefer.

When you update the site on WP, run the static extraction again and update your actual site.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.

[Thread #39 for this comm, first seen 28th Jan 2026, 12:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

It depends what you mean by nice and how complex it is? I built my own site which is basically my front end access to all the services I host. I wrote it extremely basically in html and got just the very basic context of what I wanted setup. Then I put the whole thing into Claude, and asked it to tidy it up. Then I started a new Claude session and put the whole thing in again and asked it to modernise it. Then did the same again but asked it to improve it. After about 5 or 6 run thoughts, I was happy with it. But it only has 2 pages, the first main page for anybody, and the 2nd admin page password protected just for me.