Why I migrated from Wordpress to Hugo

1. Security

One of the main reasons for migrating was because of security. I have a number of WordPress websites that I look after, and I use the Wordfence security plugin on all of them. I have Wordfence setup to send me weekly activity reports, and each week, without fail, all the WordPress sites are attacked from at least a dozen different countries.

The content on these websites rarely changes once posted, so a static website generator like Hugo is perfect for my needs and makes my website more secure as the user is accessing static html files, so there are no dynamic php files or database access that can be exploited by attackers. No known security vulnerabilities with WordPress or plugins that can be used by attackers targeting my website.

2. Speed

A static website generated by Hugo provides your website with faster page loads as there is no code running to process plugins or to access a database. A static html file loads fast and is secure.

3. Git Source Control

Having a static website also means I can use free GitHub Pages Websites for my open source projects and allocate a subdomain or domain for the project website and documentation.

Git source control is another benefit, as I have full version control of my website, and I can use GitHub Actions to automatically deploy the website to either GitHub Pages or my own vps whenever a change is pushed to GitHub.

4. More Control and Flexibility

I have greater flexibility in how I design my website and generate my website content. I can use markdown, html or a combination of both to create my content. I also save money as I’m no longer using paid third party plugins to add features to my website and it’s more secure because not using those plugins removes possible security threats that attackers can exploit.

I love that I’m not restricted by a page designer and I can create content my way using any code editor. I can create custom code on the fly for any situation then test locally and once I’m happy I can commit the changes to git and push the changes to GitHub, then the GitHub Actions Workflow I have setup will automatically build and deploy the website, so the latest version is always used without me having to do a thing.

5. Hugo Compared to Jekyll and Eleventy

I have also built websites with Jekyll and Eleventy and have ultimately choosen to use Hugo for my personal website and any future projects.

The main reason for this is that Hugo includes everything I need as a batteries included project. Both Jekyll and Eleventy required multiple third-party plugins to get the website to work the way that I wanted.

Using third-party plugins adds risk to my websites in the following ways:

• I’m relying on a third-party to provide needed functionality to my website. If the maintainer moves onto other things and stops updating the plugin then I risk not being able to use that plugin with future versions of the static website generator the plugin works with.
• There is a growing trend of bad actors exploiting source code repositories for malicious purposes such as the crypto currency stealing malware that was exploiting multiple popular packages in multiple programming language package manager repositories.

By only relying on Hugo as the sole source of features for my website there is less risk of malicious code being deployed to my system and a greater likelihood of my website continuing to work long term as the features I use are maintained by the Hugo maintainers and not random third-parties.

6. Conclusion

At the end of the day, WordPress is a complete Content Management System targeted at normal users and I’m not it’s target audience. Hugo is designed for coders and is much nicer for me to work with.

Overall, I’m very happy with my new website, using Hugo to generate my website into static html files. It has a minimal learning curve, and once setup, it’s very flexible, making it more likely I will create new content.