It has been a while since I wanted to migrate away from WordPress. I’ve been using it since the beginning of this blog. Almost 12 Years now. It allowed me to create content very easy and fast. I remember days when I was able to create 2 or 3 posts per day.

Since 2006 WordPress evolved with the web itself. It was lightning fast back then but over the time, or to be more precise with the amount of the plugins and features it was getting slower and slower. Sometimes it helped to install some kind of database optimizer, remove slow plugin or ultimately switch to faster (more expensive of course) hosting provider.

I even ended up paying to some WordPress/Html/Css gurus to optimize my site which sometimes helped but most of the times after some changes was broken again.

Somewhere last year I read about static site generators. They looked cool but back then were pretty much hard to implement for me.

My first choice was Hexo but due to some cool theme back then. I couldn’t implement it completely because I had to use markdown language which I didn’t know at all.

Project Static Site Generator was killed.

A.D 2019

On one of my WordPress sites I started to use a brilliant plugin called WP Githuber MD https://github.com/terrylinooo/githuber-md. Slowly, step by step I migrated first posts to markdown language and I started to write some posts in it. Once, one of the main issues was fixed I migrated the blog toHugo Website.

Hugo is a static site generator written in Go language. It is blazing fast to generate pages.

Personally you should find SSG (Static Site Generator) which will work for you the best.

You can find a lot of them sorted by popularity, issues, number of forks etc –> Static Website Generator.

How to host it?

It is actually quite simple. Once you create your site, generate content and copy stuff from /public directory. You will find only static files - html, css, js, images.

They are very easily to host. Small web server, Azure Blobs, Amazon S3 or GitHub/GitLab pages. Zero php files, complex setups and so on.

Add in front of it any CDN (CloudFlare, Cloudfront) and you can handle gazzilion more requests than typical web server with dynamic content.

Summary

The intent of the post is to simply show you that it can be done. It is not the easiest thing, it requires some effort but benefits are incredible. I have my blog as a code stored on GitLab (preference of choice over GutHub simply because GitLab allows you to host up to 10GiB of files :) ).

I can run the blog whenever I want, it is fast, secure and fun to write again.

P.S.

If something isn’t working ping me. I might need to fix some stuff.