Farewell, WordPress! Hello, Hugo

Firstly, a little bit of history - when I begun this blog, I’ve already been using WordPress on Pplware for a while. So, I tought: I know it, it’s simple, it’s easy to use, I’m going to use it on my personal blog.

After deciding I was going to use WordPress, I bought a domain on GoDaddy (which I recommend) and paid for hosting on PTServidor. With the blog set up, I started writing posts in portuguese. I did it for some time.

Less than an year afterwards, I moved my blog to DigitalOcean (which I recommend too). I had 100$ from GitHub Education for free to use on DigitalOcean and I give it a try. It was a nice and useful experience: I learned how to set up a server, apache and some of other things in a production environment.

I was using a cache plugin to speed up the blog and also using the Yoast SEO plugin. I think both are really useful and I recommend them if you’re using WordPress.

Two months later - I think it was two months, I’m not sure - I decided to use Jekyll on GitHub Pages. Jekyll is a static website generator, i.e., it converts some source files to static and plain HTML. After fighting a lot with Ruby on Windows, I moved my blog from WordPress to Jekyll.

Everything was running fine until I formatted my computer. And then I tought: no, I’m not gonna install Ruby again, not on Windows, I’m not enter the hell. I searched for more static site generators and I found Hugo.

Hugo is a really nice and easy to use static website generator, built using Go (one of the languages I admire), that have standalone executables. It doesn’t have dependencies. It’s simple, easy. Why not?

I moved everything to this new system and created a new template (the black one before the current one). It’s very simple to create themes for Hugo. All of my blog’s code is on henriquedias-source at GitHub. Then, I just have to deploy it to hacdias.github.io repository so I can use GitHub Pages hosting which is free.

I also configured CloudFlare and my website is very fast now. It’s delivered by their CDN and I’m using SSL. I defend that every website should be using HTTPS.

Concluding, I’m saving money because I’m only paying the domain. I’m using a easy to use system (of course Hugo is not for everyone, but it’s simple). My blog is faster than ever. Google Page Speed Insights gives me a very high score. I’m very satisfied with Hugo.

If you’re confortable with Markdown, HTML, CSS and JS, I recommend you Hugo with GitHub Pages.