i’ve been building sites with wordpress since 2010.
it’s been a great ride, and i’ve had the opportunity to work at some of the biggest companies within the ecosystem - flywheel, wp engine, automattic (under both woocommerce + wordpress.com). i’m incredibly grateful for having had these opportunities.
i’ve always cherished how wordpress makes it trivial to manage content and focus on writing - a godsend for bloggers. it remains one of the best ways to publish web content quickly and reliably. i also deeply value wordpress’ open-source heritage and distribution model.
despite this, a few things have long been drawing me away from the ecosystem.
the first is plugins. by this, i mean that plugins have two deleterious effects for me. for one, they create maintenance overhead (if plugins aren’t updated they can be a formidable attack vector for bad actors) and secondly, they make me lazier. when using plugins it can be very tempting to slap together a smorgasbord of random stuff onto your site and this adds bloat and detracts from the very real need to understand how your site works. as someone looking to grow their web development skills (and those of programming at large), i felt this was holding me back.
this isn’t the only reason, though. recently i’ve been saddened to see the companies that i worked for declaring war on one another (great fireship video on this, here). the result is a less stable ecosystem and uncertainty about what comes next for wordpress. this should serve as a stark reminder that it’s important to diversify your toolkit - you can never predict what the future will hold. as such, now feels like the right moment to try a new paradigm.
finally, wordpress hosting can get expensive. if you’re not aiming to host a bunch of heavy media content in a CRM, there’s not much need (in my humble opinion) to run all of that overhead, which increases costs disproportionately to added utility. times are tough, and price-to-performance counts.
hugo, which i’m using for this site, appears to meet my needs pretty well. it’s quick, flexible, and supports all of the standards that my relatively straightforward needs require. let’s see how it goes!