Website development has always intrigued me. So back in 2017 (I was 13), I decided to master WordPress. I made an e-commerce store out of it. Created several blogs. And even tried building my own theme.

Since last year though, after setting up a WordPress site on my own domain, I noticed significant drawbacks of WordPress. (Although, I didn’t have a very good host)

Drawbacks of WordPress⌗

  1. Slow Response Time (drawback of dynamic page creation through database calls)
  2. Lot of Dependencies if You Need Extra Features (and frequent updates)
  3. Difficult to Keep Track of Server Configurations (unless you are on a Managed Wordpress Plan)
  4. Lots of Unnecessary Code and Features taking up Bandwidth
  5. Security Risks (thanks to the popularity of WordPress and the stack it uses)
  6. Need to learn PHP for customization
  7. And all of this becomes expensive very quickly

Yep. That’s all of my actual WordPress experience packed into 7 bullet points. Finally, I decided to get rid of WordPress.

Why HUGO?⌗

Since other JAMstack frameworks are simply overkill for a simple blog, my choices quickly boiled down to just 2 options: Hugo and Jekyll. Both of which I had no prior knowledge about. Neither had I ever used Liquid or Go templates before.

The ultimate deciding factor?⌗

Speed and themes.

Hugo calls itself “the fastest framework in the world”, and rightfully so. It builds my entire site in under 150 miliseconds. Hugo themes are also more polished and featured. Since I currently don’t have time to start from scratch, Hugo was my way to go.

Benefits of HUGO?⌗

  1. Blazing Fast (written in Go)
  2. Extremely Secure (it’s a static site generator)
  3. No unnecessary fluff (you are in control of your website’s code)
  4. Free hosting (GitHub Pages for non-commercial sites)
  5. And should something happen to the WordPress core, PHP, or MySQL, your site will still be live ;)

What am I missing in Hugo after switching?⌗

  1. Comments section is missing since I don’t want to use Disqus.
  2. Currently, I have no way of adding image galleries to the site.
  3. I have deliberately chosen not to connect to Google Fonts.

Proof?⌗

Check out my PageSpeed Score. It’s 💯 for both, mobile and desktop.

pagespeed score

My site's PageSpeed Score after switching