I'm Leaving Wordpress For Good

I’ve been a fan of Wordpress for almost 2 decades. Something that started as a simple experiment, ended up being the main method of building many of my websites in the past. And not just Wordpress. I have also tried Joomla and Drupal, but of course Wordpress, being the one with the best plugins support, made me stick to it.

Now the problem with database-driven content management systems is that they are very hard to maintain. Everytime i was making a simple change, i had to go to the backend and export the database file, and also save the files that contain wordpress installation / my posts etc. It was tedious. And yes i know there are plugins that automate that, but i’ve tried really hard to keep my installation as minimal as it can be.

And you need to be minimal cause these content management systems are very heavy. I’ve tried multiple hosting companies and basically the end result is this: If you are using a shared hosting, you gotta expect bad response speeds and even the slightest installation matters. Start downloading plugins and writing posts and you’re going to see your database grow enormously and the loading speeds go down because with each page load, the site has to grab all text from the backend database. And since Wordpress is responsible for the majority of web content, it will also attract wannabe hackers to your site, who will try to experiment their noob skills. If you don’t know how to manually harden wordpress, you are going to need at least 2 plugins that will do it for you and some of them like WordFence which is one of the defacto security plugins for many people, will already slow down your installation before you even start to add content.

After disabling RPC, change admin paths, adding brute force protection and 2FA, you will basically prevent 99.9% of script kiddy attacks.

And although i put a good amount of effort into protecting my sites, it still is distrurbing to get daily notifications about 100 different script kiddies who are trying to hack your site. I was literally seeing people download whatever wordpress hack script they could find from GitHub and randomly trying them on my site. I had to browse through logs to see all of their ’efforts’ in case there was some precaution measure i wasn’t aware of, and i had to do this daily.

Local development was also a hussle since you had to install XAMPP and change MySQL entries from online to localhost paths. If you make a few changes using the local copy, you will probably have to upload the whole site again, since it’s really hard to figure out which files and MySQL entries have been affected. That’s a huge waste of time on most web hosting companies who offer ridiculous upload speed times.

I was also missing the simplicity of the old WWW where speeds were so slow that you could not basically add anything else than text to your webpage cause it would take an eternity to load. It seems that i am not the only one who feels this way cause there are multiple sites with the purpose of bringing this look & feel back like https://neocities.org/ , https://bearblog.dev/ and https://tilde.club/ .

I didnt want to use someone else’s platform so my options were two: i either had to use a flatfile cms solution or some framework like Hexo, Eleventy, Jekyll, Hugo, Gatsby, or Next.js which can convert markdown files into website ready files. A flatfile cms supports databases which means that you will not have to forget features like commenting or allowing user creation / login. The difference between database-driven CMS and flatfile CMS is that all database content is saved to a file in the same folder that your website resides. There’s no need to go to the backend to reach the database for editing / maintenance purposes and backing up your website is as simple as pressing CTRL+A, CTRL+C, CTRL+V. Of course having database in the same folder as your site can also be a dissadvantage when it comes to security and i didnt even care for features like comments and multiple users since the only user that posts articles on my sites is me.

Markdown offers multiple advantages:

It’s simple to use, it has basic formatting that covers most needs, its portable since it’s basically simple text that can be copied into other apps, and can be converted into a variety of formats easily. Using one of the frameworks mentioned above or even obsidian with some html export plugins, you can easily create a blazing fast website that wont need any kind of maintenance, cannot be hacked since there is no database in it, and your posts can be transferred to other platforms in case you ever change your mind and want to return to some CMS in the future. You can also have better search engine optimization for your site and there are multiple ways to add some external commenting system in case you desperately want that on your site.

I really liked Wordpress but moving on is basically a no brainer for my blogging needs and will save me a ton of time on backing up and upgrading.