For several years I have had to deal with repeated emails from my old cPanel host telling me that so-and-so plugin is out of date or that some critical vulnerability has been found in WordPress. Frankly, I have been sick of using WordPress for my personal website for a long time. I originally set it up using cPanel on VentraIP because it was cheap ($12/year) and easy to manage especially with auto-updating plugins and themes but I have been considering migrating to something simpler and easier to use for at least 5 years.

Why move from WordPress?

I could have chosen to migrate my site away from VentraIP and keep the existing WordPress site but I chose not to for three main reasons:

  1. Security, I am scared to host WordPress on a VPS or other non-managed server. I like WordPress as a user and find it very easy to work with however the frequency of patches and plugin vulnerabilities is too much for me to look after for a personal site. I want my personal site to be something easy to manage that I don’t have to think about frequently or wonder if I have been hacked.
  2. Reliability has become a big issue with VentraIP cPanel websites in the last 2 years. My site has been running on the same service for over 10 years with mostly no problems or intervention required by me, in these last two years I have started receiving more errors from tools like Ahrefs and Google Search Console saying they are unable to access my site. At times I have been unable to load the WordPress admin portal, simply receiving an error as if the site was down. I put this down to my site having few visitors meaning the service is spun down and needs to cold boot when someone accesses it but this is not something I am interested in dealing with. The site is not complicated and should be able to run at all times with low requirements.
  3. The new WordPress post editor never worked for me. A while ago, I can’t remember how long, WordPress force-updated me to use their new post editor which was meant to be more modern and I suppose work better but these benefits never materialized for me. I am not sure if it was the theme I used or something else but the editor looked like it was stuck between light and dark modes, icons looked odd and inserting images was janky. I am sure there were some simple fixes but again this is a personal site I am not looking to spend a lot of time on. The value of this site to me is writing, not building it.

Why choose Hugo?

I chose Hugo because it is dead simple, easy to use and has all the features I need. There are dozens of static site generators out there but Hugo caught my eye a few years ago and it felt like a good candidate for my personal site. I use Vite for NickBuilds.com but that does not have the same blogging and content mechanics built in that Hugo has. I like writing in Markdown, I will normally draft posts in my notebook or Notion which had poor formatting when I tried moving to WordPress. Now that I am on Hugo I am writing posts in straight Markdown into the project and deploying immediately. This is a fast workflow that is working so far, once a post is published I can backfill it to Notion so I have a more permanent copy that is easily accessible. Hugo being a static site generator has a very low attack surface especially when compared to WordPress. I am confident that if you had 100 Hugo sites and 100 WordPress sites that WP ones would be hacked before the Hugo group. At the end of the day I am publishing static HTML files into Cloudflare Pages with no server management handled by me. I have chosen the PaperMod theme which is based on Hugo’s Paper theme but with some extra functionality like Search. Choosing themes is always tricky but I found Paper Mod to be easy to read with no complex JavaScript elements that are unnecessary for a site like mine. I have already seen significant improvements in speed metrics since migrating.

Hosting and deployments

Hosting is through Cloudflare Pages which was reasonably easy to setup and only a few failing pipelines that Claude helped me work through. Deployments are managed through GitHub, I generate a post in the command line, write the content and push to main. After which the content will appear on my site in a matter of minutes. True that this is more complex than publishing straight to WordPress from the WP Admin however it means I have backups built in to GitHub’s infrastructure and have admin surface that could be attacked while my attention is elsewhere. I am not sure if Cloudflare Pages will have some of the same issues that a shared cPanel host has but we will find out and if it becomes a problem I will migrate again. I feel comfortable hosting a static Hugo-generated site on a VPS. Ahrefs has already noted a 37% improvement in my speed bringing my site up to a 97/100 score compared to the ~60% it was on WordPress.

Why migrations are easier now

The title of this post alludes to this project being easy, which it was. For years I spent time thinking about how to migrate my WordPress site, exporting images, maintaining SEO, keeping the hundreds of old posts I have marked as draft. This site has acted as a personal journal since 2011 and when I read old posts it is like interacting with my past self. I did not want to lose any of that in the migrationa but I did not want to keep hosting WordPress.

I started by asking Claude how we could migrate my site and what would be needed. We built an export plan and Claude wrote some Python scripts I could use to pull images and export all the data needed that was not coming from the default WordPress exports. Claude then generated the site’s content, organized everything into folders and formatted my posts to Markdown. All of this happened while I was able to continue working on regular client work. This migration loomed as a daunting project for years but was done in a couple of afternoons and completed in three days, perhaps that timeline was realistic for me if I worked on it full-time but I suspect not.

My question now is what other projects have I been putting off and what improvements can I make to my workflows now that the cost of doing them is so low. This is why I do not believe software engineering careers are dead. We will find more projects to complete, better refactors, cheaper infrastructure all because we now have tools that give us more time to investigate and brainstorm those improvements.

Image: Southside Park in Tyler, Texas.