HACKER Q&A
📣 lazyweb

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


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/


  👤 jitendrac Accepted Answer ✓
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.