“After fiddling around with a bunch of other platforms. I decided that 1/4 of the internet couldn’t be wrong with choosing wordpress (yes they could be). This is the platform I will be using for now. We will see how well it works for the time being.” – Hello World –
Over the course of this website, fundamentally what I have used is WordPress because it is relatively easy to maintain, has a good enough ongoing dev path and allowed me to post updates from my phone with WordPress.com integration via Jetpack.
I noticed over the past couple of months, the add1son.com/blog/ page was taking way longer than it should have to load in comparison to https://add1son.com/index.html which is just a static landing page. It makes sense that it would take slightly longer to load, but it was taking ~5s to load my bookmarks / software pages. Going through the troubleshooting process, I begrudgingly updated 3 versions of the operating system of the VPS itself. I rebooted the machine, it was still slow. This had me scratching my head as I thought this was a simple and likely culprit.
Just for fun, I switched the theme to a newer theme to see what would happen because I have been using pretty much the same theme for all of these years. Then the website loaded in a blink of an eye, fast again. Thinking, “well surely this can’t be the only thing that changed,” – I re-loaded the previous theme and the website was still fast. I am unsure if this is due to the fact that the .htaccess file is rewritten on theme migration or what is happening in the backend but the long and short of it means that I spent half a day getting the VPS up to date when all I needed to do was do a theme shuffle.
This focused me on the idea that I have been thinking about for a while which is basically using a static site generator instead of the bulky, clunky, way too many bells and whistles – WordPress.
A static website generator has a lot of pros, but I think the best ones would be editing everything in markdown and not having to deal with the way WordPress themes / blocks work.
The website is ultra lightweight and fast loading, everything a modern website should be – all killer with no filler.
I just need to migrate a lot of my content off that likely won’t come across in the .xml export and then be on my jolly way, hopefully will have that done by the end of the year.