Article

Goodbye Wordpress

August 3, 2016 | Posted by Paul


When it comes to Content Management Systems, Wordpress dominates the market. ManageWP reports that nearly 75 Million websites are running Wordpress.

Wordpress is convenient. It’s easy to install, easy to use, and easy to customize. There are a seemingly endless supply of themes and plugins available to suit your every need. This very website has used Wordpress for many years, until now.

So why the change?

Consider the following:

  • There have been, and continue to be many vulnerabilities for Wordpress
  • Wordpress installations are the frequent target of brute force attacks and penetration tests
  • While caching can help to some degree, Wordpress is very slow and expensive to scale

Introducing Hugo

Hugo: A fast and modern static site generator

Hugo is a fast and modern static site generator. Like other static site generators, Hugo builds your website rather than serving it on the fly through a runtime like PHP, or a database like MySQL. Web servers are really good at serving static content, so this eliminates much of the overhead.

With all of the static site generators out there, why did we go with Hugo?

  1. Hugo is written in Go and is really, really fast. (~1 ms write time per page)
  2. Hugo builds pages and blog posts from Markdown files.
  3. Hugo has a built in web server for development, rendering changes on the fly.
  4. There is a wordpress-to-hugo exporter, so we were able to import existing posts.
  5. You can create your own themes.

Getting started with Hugo is really simple and Hugo will run on Windows, Linux, and OSX. Remember, Hugo is a static site generator, so you’ll install it on your computer and upload the distribution to your web server after it’s generated. Alternatively, you could run hugo on your web server and use source control to check out your updates and re-build your site.

If you want to try Hugo, take a look at their Quickstart guide. It’s quick and simple to get up and running with a prebuilt theme.

Creating a new theme is really the most difficult part of using Hugo, and their documentation is not great in this area but we were able to find a solution to most of our issues on their community forum.

This post was generated from a simple Markdown text file, cool right?

Conclusion

Some of us remember the days of Dreamweaver, and FrontPage, or writing our own HTML pages in Notepad. In a way, the Internet has come full circle. Static site generators are becoming the wave of the future, only this time for all the right reasons.

Hugo is for those of us that like to break free of the norm and try something different and better. Much like Blesta. Never settle.