Ask HN: Best way to migrate from Wordpress to something simpler/more elegant? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best way to migrate from Wordpress to something simpler/more elegant?

2 pointslazyweb2 comments

I've been running my personal blog [0] on a selfhosted linux box (Hetzner server) for about six years. A lot less experienced back then, I opted for WP. But it is a hassle. I've tried making my site as lightweight as possible, but there's a lot of functionality I just don't need. I'm the sole author/user of my low traffic site.

On the technical side - a large attack surface, constant security issues, themes randomly screwing up site access, lots of custom nginx rules to mitigate potential issues and make PHP play along nicely.

Content wise - the online editor is a HUGE pain. Probably the biggest reason preventing me from posting more. Also, I tried disabling the inclusion of external resources in the past, but a few days ago I noticed ublock blocking fonts.googleapis.com through my site. I don't want any of this.

In short, I'd like to move my content to a new site, preferably something minimalistic, maybe static, with a small footprint and entirely self-contained. No more wonky WYSIWYG editing, constant security worries, MySQL/PHP dependencies.

Some thoughts regarding migrating:

* Should I keep a list of deeplinks to my posts to integrate as nginx redirects so search engine hits still work?

* Are comments overrated? I've had just a few over the years, with mostly mixed relevance.

* Depending on the technology used, does it make sense to leverage CI/CD? I'm already running a private gitlab instance for various tasks.

I've seen really beautiful personal pages linked on HN in the past. Are there recommendations or positive experiences with selfhosted sites?

[0] https://jschumacher.info/

If your main goal is to run a hobby blog, I will recommend you to stick to the WordPress with simple theme(I use astra).

Set WordPress and themes to auto-update and use a clasic WordPress editor plugin.

Add cloudflare for caching and use minimum number of plugins.

No, Wordpress is horrible. I have worked with it for my clients for years, and I’ve moved everyone of them to something else, just have 2 left to move.

Security is a problem. Many of the top security plugins are scams. They make your website heavy, when all they do is add nginx / htaccess directives. Well, maybe just publish docs to do that. Same for caching plug-ins. They claim to regularly update their rules, you don’t need to do that. Most web servers are fine if configured with security in mind. Need more protection? Put cloudflare or another waf in front of it. Why would you make PHP handle ratelimiting, bots, etc when every request has to wake up the entire server and load every file?

Plug-ins break for no reason. WP claims to be composable, but try to build a more complex website and you quickly realize that there is no framework to guarantee that plugins play well together. Then you’re on to debugging each and every plug-in. This also happens on updates. It’s insane.

Almost all plugins are scams. A plug-in will tell you that it will give you features x, y and z. You download the free version and quickly learn that to even try the actual features you need to buy, after which you realize, by reaching out to the developer that they meant the features would only work on use cases a, b and c, but that is never documented.

Because of scammy plugins, even the simplest features become expensive (plugins) and also require considerable coding.

PHP is an ok language, but the concept that a request has to bootstrap the entire application from rest is crazy. I know we have amazing frameworks like laravel, but Wordpress turned me away from PHP entirely.

Hooks and filters are an opportunity for every plugins or piece of code to add seconds to every request, bc they all run as part of the bootstrap process.

The worst part of Wordpress is it’s database model. Everything is either a post or metadata, and the metadata is linked via a poorly architected join table that does not allow any optimization. If you need to build a new feature, you quickly realize that nothing will scale because because the db is busy processing 100 queries to pull a single post.

If you look at the source of plugins, most functionality is implemented with workarounds like creating custom tables outside Wordpress.

I know WP means well and that it has a huge community and most websites are on WP. But I think people invested too much to drop WP, so if you’re getting started, stay away from WP, try ghost if you need a full cms or something like strapi if you need a headless cms.

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