Goodbye WordPress

I started this blog in September 2011 with this highly controversial post (which has apparently lost all the controversy with the loss of comments but trust me it got pretty wild back then) and have been writing here on and off. Till today, 25^th Oct 2016, this blog had been powered by Wordpress, that too pretty well I must day. But starting today this is now a static site comprising only of static HTML, JS and CSS files using Hexo as the backend static site generator. If you have visited the site in the past the first thing you will notice would be the improved speed. Taking away all the runtime code compilations has drastically reduced the load and render time of the site. Honestly, a simple blog/site does not need to be dynamic at all. The primary reason I, like everyone, chose WordPress is the sheer ease of use. Having said that I would like to list down some of the factors that made me decide to make the switch.

Speed - Whenever we open a web url the page that is rendered in the end is HTML, CSS and JS only. No matter what the backend technology is or how complicated the logic is the end result would always be HTML only. Wordpress was doing the same but with an added step of running PHP code to determine what HTML has to be rendered. By eliminating this step I am able to save the load time.
Safety - If you have used any of the PHP based CMS’s in the past I am sure you are aware of the “Viagra Hacks” that these are prone to. If you are not careful about updating your Wordpress or Joomla installations or do not have a reliable hosting provider you will not ever know when your site will get hacked and search results for your site on google will start showing links to Viagra. Not only is this embarassing at that moment but takes a lot of time to fix. No such problem exists with a static site.
Better and easy deployment - This site is currently hosted on AWS S3 which means this site will have 99.99% uptime, and 99.999999999% of durability (yes, 9 nines), I won’t pay anything for hosting if I am doing less than 20k file requests a month, and I won’t have to waste any more time messing with servers.
Cost Effective - I no longer have to manage a hosting/server which saves me a monthly fixed cost I had been incurring for a very long time. And S3 os cheap.
Less Code - The static site generator tool Hexo is really minimalistic in nature. Any change in the theme layout only requires the knowledge of HTML, CSS and JS which fortunately I know :)

So far I am happy with the outcome and hope that this decision will prove to be a right one. I have also been a bit lazy in migrating the data and have fixed the excerpts for only the front page so far so lets hope I get the rest of the excerpts done soon enough. If you have any questions or comments about the migration, get in touch.

Image Credit: http://habitualhomebody.com/goodbye-wordpress/