Switching to Jekyll
I’ve been pretty invested in WordPress for the last 10 years. I’ve created themes, plugins and even submitted a couple small patches to the WordPress core. However within the last year or so my focus has changed and I’ve been using static html website generators instead. Static html brings speed and security to a website since there’s no database or anything to be compromised. There’s a lot of options available now for commenting systems, pingbacks, etc. for static sites too. This has made the switch over even easier for me.
Earlier in 2020, this very site was hacked 2 or 3 times and I discovered they got in through another WordPress website that had a bad plugin loaded. So I decided it was time to move to static html using the Jekyll generator. I found a vanilla template and designed it to be very similar to my old WordPress website. Then I moved all comments to Isso which allowed me to keep all my comments and allow new users the ability to comment as well.
The result is everything looks and feels the same! Google PageSpeed shows the site speed increased into the 96% which is great!
This has motivated me so much that I’ve been re-evaluating the need for WordPress on the smaller websites which I manage. None of them require the feature set of WordPress, so I’ve moved them to Jekyll as well.
I’ve been so devoted to WordPress that I feel a little bad about the move, but after 3 of these non-WordPress “worthy” sites I manage being compromised I feel good that static html sites closes that security threat that I had before, which I didn’t need.
Have you been thinking of making a switch? Let me know in the comments!