Moving from Wordpress to Hugo | Hacker News Reader

Moving from Wordpress to Hugo

tibobeijen.nl

82 pointstype021 comments

If you worry about Wordpress and security, and like the idea of having a static site, maybe check out Simply Static (https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/). It's a WP plugin that creates a static copy of your site. Just upload to your server and unzip, and you're done.

It is slow: it takes time to create the static output, especially if you have more than a few posts. For infrequently updated sites and blogs this plugin may be an excellent solution as it allows you to access a world of WP themes.

If the intention was to learn how to work with servers and experiment with Ansible and Caddy, that's fine. Otherwise hosting a static site on a VPS is just overkill, from the initial setup process for a VPS (ssh config, unattended upgrades, firewall) followed by installing Caddy and using Ansible.

It's easier (and free) to just host it on Github pages or Gitlab pages and use Cloudflare as a proxy.

Two other free options I saw in a recent thread here are Netlify and Firebase hosting. Firebase looked particularly attractive as it provides a CDN as well as config driven control of things like redirects, headers, etc.

+1 Netlify.

I've really liked it for https://blog.statusok.com and https://statusok.com

GitHub webhook deploy flow, one-click SSL, 301 redirects and other rewrite support, CDN seems pretty good.

-1 Netlify

I found the netlify was slower than github pages and surge.sh according to google's speed tests.

Netlify also wants complete access to your github account. You either need to make a separate account or give them access to all of your repos.

GitHub doesn't offer anything more granular than read/write all repos in their app permissions matrix.

I understand that, but that doesn't excuse the fact I have to give them complete access to my repos.

I've always disliked the idea of using Github/Gitlab pages as it stops you serving over HTTPS. You can put Cloudflare in front to do HTTPS, but I still dislike having a proxy MITM all traffic to my website.

Great post! I started using Hugo instead of WordPress in 2015 and haven't looked back. We grew tired of manually updating sites so we built a CMS (shameless plug). https://forestry.io/. We're going to be rolling out some interesting things in the coming months.

While I'm a big fan of static site generators the reason for me not to use one for blogging is the trouble when you want to have comments without an additional third party service.

I very much dislike Javascript commenting, but you don't have to use a third party service if you host the comments yourself. Isso[0] for example can do this.

[0] https://posativ.org/isso/

I too think that and that was one of the reasons I moved to Ghost. But I'm a broke and cheap student who doesn't pay for a VPS or hosting provider currently so I have temporarily (until I join a job in July) moved back to a simple Jekyll website with Discourse for comments.

I am confused, I thought for Ghost you have to set up comments yourself as well: https://www.ghostforbeginners.com/how-to-enable-comments-on-...

I have been running Ghost for free on OpenShift but haven't set up comments. I would recommend it but I don't think OpenShift are taking on new accounts for the v2 platform where Ghost is available -- they are transitioning to "next gen" and I haven't checked if they have Ghost on that.

Oh, sorry for being unclear. Being a dynamic website, I rolled my own simple comment system (mainly to learn, I eventually replaced it with Discourse).

Thanks for recommending OpenShift. I'll be getting my first paycheck in July and will move to a hosting provider that provides best value.

Ah I see, has Discourse improved as a comment system or is it still quite hard to set up?

I was mainly recommending OpenShift because it's free but I don't know if the setup I have now is still available.

How much you would be willing to pay for a setup with built-in commenting?

(PS: I'm creating pragma.build, a web publishing platform with static page generation)

people still make the mistake of reading internet comments?

-takes out tongue from cheek ;)

If you use Jekyll, there's https://staticman.net/. An open-source solution for static comments.

This requires i give some service push access to the repository holding my website. This seems to remove one of the major advantages of static websites -- no ability to hack into a dynamic webpage and corrupt my website.

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