I migrated this site that you are reading from Wordpress to Jekyll recently. In the last couple of months, I encountered many issues with Wordpress that prompted me to look for better alternatives. Some of the issues I faced with Wordpress:
- Wordpress plugins breaking on me during upgrade
- Lack of documentation or incompatibilities between plugins
- Themes not properly working with certain plugins
- I experienced slow load time1
- Difficulty to keep my local setup consistent with my production setup
Honestly, the issues I faced with Wordpress can be resolved given sufficient time and budget. However, I felt that static site generators are more appropriate for my use case and there was no need for powerful cms like Wordpress.
I looked at various static site generators and respective themes offered by the community in different ecosystems. Currently, at the time of writing, this site is built using Jekyll2 and chirpy theme. One day when I have sufficient time, I plan to create my own theme.
Other static site generators and themes that I liked:
I am not really sure if this is because of my low cost setup or the cost involved in wordpress making queries to the deployed database and pull down the php pages and run and generate the html pages. I used a cache and minifier as well but these didn’t resolve the issue. In fact, minifier caused some formatting issues. ↩
This is a ruby based tool ↩