Recently, I was trying to figure out what’s the best way to load a Recent Posts feed onto a static HTML site and I came across a couple of resources that suggested loading wp-blog-header.php onto the static page and using the WordPress API to query your latest posts.

require('wp-blog-header.php')

I was expecting a larger page load, but only saw a 1kb increase in page size and 150ms increase in load time (average). So I proceeded to build a query for the Recent Posts query, which I found on WorldOWeb.

<?php 
 $args = array( 'numberposts' => 6, 'post_status'=>"publish",'post_type'=>"post",'orderby'=>"post_date");
 $postslist = get_posts( $args );

 foreach ($postslist as $post) : setup_postdata($post); ?>
 <div class="events">
 <p><strong><?php the_date(); ?></strong></p>
 <p><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="<?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></p> 
 </div>
<?php endforeach; ?>

I also tried using PHP’s DOMDocument class. So, on average, including WordPress in your static HTML will only increase the load time by ~150ms.