Migrate to Hugo from Wordpress

Posted on Dec 27, 2015

I have now liberated myself away from Wordpress. Launching new site today, now. This site has substantial archetechure changes compared to the old one.

	Old Blog	New Blog
Software	Wordpress	Hugo
Hosting	Linode	Amazon S3
Deployment	Maintain software stack, CMS	Soon to be automated
Source Control	None	GitHub
Editor	Web App	Any editor, just text files. Markdown format
Security	Self Secured (PHP based app)	Static Files, protect the AWS keys, etc
Time to maintain	Relatively lots	Relatively Zero
Optimization, CDN, Speed	Self optimization from single point	CloudFlare fronted, AWS SLA, small files, less moving parts

Why switch?

I know static site generators are the new fashion now-days. Whether the site is hosted on GitHub Pages, Amazon S3, or self hosted, it is just simpler to maintain. This is most advantageous to me, as I don’t have a desire to tinker with a server anymore (or time). Hosting my own server was fun and provided much background context that helped me with the beginning of my career. Now that context is there and more context is needed around the next generation of services. Another big point is security, having a Web/PHP/MySQL stack exposed to the internet is eventually going to be trouble if not maintained. A minor point is cost, but this blog should cost me less than 1 USD per month, so ~90% cost reduction.

Why Hugo?

There are many static site generators out there but I picked Hugo because of a few reasons. The main reason was that it was written in Go and I’m betting that I will desire some Go experience in my future. (Buzzword: Microservices). In addition, the theme engine seems pretty good to me. I was able to fork a theme and get immediate feedback on the changes I was making, this is fun since now I can extend my own themes and make modification on the fly. This current theme is a fork of another project.

How?

There are a bunch of tools out there, especially since Wordpress is such a popular platform. I’m not going to rehash it here, but essentially it was:

Convert from Wordpress to Jekyll format (the Hugo tool didn’t work out of the box)
Convert from Jekyll to Hugo (built in to Hugo)
Hack on theme, make small data mods, rebuild, push to S3, repeat until happy
Change CloudFlare DNS to S3 bucket

I picked CloudFlare because it should save me money with the caching it provides. It also seemed like the easiest way for me to enforce https, though the CloudFront method didn’t seem that hard either. CloudFlare provides “Universal SSL” for free and basically obsoletes the personal management of a SSL certificate, which is good for me.

Future

This platform that I have created for myself has me excited for the ease of use and the results it provides. In the future, I will document my use of AWS Lambda to update the content every time I do a git push - which means I will have complete server-less delivery using extremely applicable technologies in modern software.