Wordpress

Why? Security and speed are the two main factors that made me migrate dynamic sites to static sites. I used to build some small sites without any framework using PHP to reuse common files (headers, footers, database connections) with some minimalistic administration pages to avoid to do vi over ssh to manage content. Security wasn’t a concern, Internet users where nice and respectful back then (or more probably I was young and naive).

As mentioned in Going Static, I migrated my Wordpress blogs to a static site build with Hugo. Most articles on the subject convinced me that it would be easy. The truth is, it isn’t that straight forward. Content With help of a Wordpress plugin, exporting your posts and content is easy. The plugin adds the necessary front matter in Yaml format. But you still need to go through all your posts to update manually all image references.

I hosted my blog with Wordpress on my own VPS. The amount of attacks and successful hacks on this blogs is enormous. Wordpress just suffers from notoriety and therefore becomes an easy target. Maintaining Wordpress up-to-date and add some tricks to minimize the risks just didn’t become worth the pain anymore. On top of that, maintaining a VPS to run Apache, PHP and MySQL to serve a few never changing posts didn’t make sense anymore.

Everybody is aware that WordPress is a heavy truck to display some “mostly” static content. Each Plugin or Widget that is added ads some stylesheet calls, javascript calls and database requests. This all together slows up the loading time of your blog. And it gets even worse when the site become popular and has to deal with thousands of requests. Why request for each visitor something from the database when the content only changes once in a while? Why go through all the PHP logic when the final rendered HTML is always the same?