Almost exactly 9 years ago, I launched this blog on WordPress. And today, the time finally came for a change.
Back then, WordPress felt like a great solution. Everything was easy to click together. You didn’t have to think too much about the underlying mechanics — just install, configure a theme, and start writing.
Over time, though, it started to bother me.
What annoys me most today is how much infrastructure you need just to host a simple blog:
- A web server with PHP support
- A database (MariaDB)
- And, of course, WordPress itself
Maintaining all of that has become unnecessary overhead for me. Updating WordPress is time I’d much rather spend on other projects and interests. And as we all know, an unpatched WordPress installation is asking for trouble.
Why increase your attack surface if a simple blog can be fully static?
Some time ago, the idea of using Hugo started forming in my head. I had read about it earlier — I think someone on Debian Planet mentioned migrating to it. The idea stuck with me.
And today was finally the day — I made the migration.
A big help along the way was the wp2hugo project:
https://github.com/ashishb/wp2hugo
The process went surprisingly smoothly. Most importantly, I didn’t have to manually wrestle with exporting and importing everything into Hugo — the script handled the dirty work for me. What remained was polishing things up and making sure everything looked right.
I also considered Astro, but it felt like overkill for my needs. Hugo turned out to be a perfect fit. It has great themes, and best of all, I can write in Markdown — which I’ve grown very fond of since using GitHub.
Another big plus: clean, simple code that lives in git.
A new post is just a new .md file.
That’s beautiful.
No database blobs. No hidden magic. Just files.