Hi guys, I’m back for good and now with a better website.
PushEVs is no longer made with WordPress, now it’s made with a static site generator called Hugo.
Hugo describes itself as “world’s fastest framework for building websites”, but that’s not why I chose it to make the new PushEVs website.
As time goes by, WordPress websites start to become slow and buggy - partly because installing plugins is fun and easy… Security and backups/restores can also give us more headaches than they should.
This is why I chose a static generator like Hugo:
- Clean code that makes websites super fast
- Backups and restores are easy with git
- No database to manage and worry about getting hacked
- Requires less server resources, meaning less electricity used and less pollution created
- Free hosting with Cloudflare Pages
I was already using Hugo in some of my other websites, so I really wanted to finally stop using WordPress.
These were the tools I used:
- wordpress-export-to-markdown to convert WordPress posts and pages to markdown files
- Visual Studio Code to write markdown
- ChatGPT to help with regex and clean up the code
- ImageMagick to batch convert image files to AVIF
- Coffee…
Migrating from WordPress wasn’t as easy as I wished and there are optimizations to be made - in the next days I’ll check every post one by one.
However, I think the hardest part was finding a Hugo theme that had all the functions I was using in WordPress and I didn’t want to lose. I especially like the recent/featured posts widget in the sticky sidebar. The theme developer is also very knowledgeable and helpful, which made my decision easier.
The code of this website is now open-source, not only in the hope of inspiring others to do the same, but also to allow my visitors to read the code and suggest changes.
I’m still considering if I should continue with Disqus comments or migrate to the open-source alternative called Giscus…
I hope that you like the changes.
