Goodbye Wordpress, Hello Jekyll

You’ve crossed me for the last time WordPress. While I appreciate all your years of service, it’s time to go.

Goodbye WordPress

While I had found WordPress to be ‘ok’ and there does exist a plugin for everything under the sun.. Every few days I would get a notification that wordpress itself or one of the many diaspora of plugins would need an update, and then invariably something would break. Now I’m spending time not creating content, but just doing admin work trying to find all the places something may have gone wrong. God forbid, the hosting platform needed to upgrade the PHP runtime on the server.

Hello Jekyll

Jekyll has been around for a while, and I’ve been using it a bit over on GitHub. So it was time to take the plunge. Once I got over the initial hump of figuring out how the site was wired together, I was quickly able to get a simple theme together. Now I just needed my content.

I did say that WordPress had a plugin for everything, they even had a plugin for breaking up with WordPress. I installed the Jekyll Exporter plugin, and of course it didn’t work because it was conflicting with some other plugin. Eventually I was able to get it to spit out a zip file with all of my content, I dragged it over into my new project and BAM! Look at that, my whole site is back.

Damn is it fast!

I mean, of course it is, that is the point, you can’t really go faster than static content, but you kinda forget what that means in the modern web. Now that its fast, I also spent five more minutes tweaking a few accessibilty things so I would have 100s across the board in my lighthouse scores. That would have taken me ages in WP.