Goodbye WordPress, Hello Jekyll (Again)

2020-08-13

For the past four months this blog has been running on WordPress - but that ended today. I’ve officially switched back over to Jekyll. I’m not going to spend too much time delving into why I made the transition back, but I’ll leave some cliff-notes for any interested parties.

The big issues with my WordPress setup

I have to state that these problems existed based on my own setup / hosting choices with WordPress - this is not a direct reflection of WP itself.

  1. No theme editor access - I was using EasyWP (Namecheap etc.) for my web hosting. It only cost me $3.88/month, which was very cheap for the quality of service provided. Unfortunately, this low price came with some setbacks. EasyWP doesn’t allow users to edit header.php or functions.php files directly in the theme editor. Having to resort to FTP for simple one-line change was annoying.
  2. Super cache - Caching web pages is wonderful for users on subsequent visits, but EasyWP took this to the extreme. Making minor styling updates sometimes required code changes in the header.php file directly in order to persist (see problem with editing these files in point #1).
  3. Monthly cost - As I stated above, spending $3.88 on a monthly basis was peanuts in the grand scheme of things. Still, an extra monthly subscription for a side hobby seemed overkill for my use case.
  4. Future proofing - In the end, having the core website generate itself into static files means it will stand the test of time on the interwebs. HTML & CSS FTW.

What I lost in the switch

  1. Comments - I loved the concept of owing / hosting comments directly on each post but this seemed like a fair trade-off when compared to the positives listed above. I might circle back around and use something like Commento or Gitment
  2. Blog anywhere - Having the ability to hop on any machine, log in to my site and blog was awesome. Over time though, I found myself not doing this very often. Most times when composing an article I found I would write it out, edit and publish all in one sitting. Cool concept - just not as useful.

Moving forward

I’ve learned to stick with what keeps me productive (and in this case, keeps me writing consistently). I still love WordPress and won’t hesitate to reach for it when the need arrives. Unfortunately, it seems my personal website isn’t one of those instances.