Moved Away from WordPress

Jun 15, 2025 · 4 min read ·

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Since creating this website back in 2016, this Database Star website has been operating on the WordPress platform.

And the domain that this site used before databasestar, it was also on WordPress, which I started in 2012.

However, recently I decided to make a change.

I've moved the site to use Netlify and GitHub.

I'll explain why I made the move and what it means.

Using WordPress

For about 13 years I was using WordPress. It's a very popular solution for blogs and websites.

You sign up for a hosting provider, install Wordpress, and use the content management system to publish posts.

The process was pretty easy. WordPress can also be expanded using plugins for many things.

This worked well for a while.

Why Move?

There were a few things that happened in 2024 and 2025 that made me consider moving away from WordPress.

Less posting: Firstly, I wasn't publishing as often on the site. My primary content channel was now YouTube, so I didn't get to use WordPress that often.

Hosting costs: I was paying what I thought was quite a bit of money for the website. There were hosting costs (about $700 per year) and some costs for plugins (about $150 per year), bringing the total to about $850 per year.

Speed: My website was getting slower. WordPress runs on a PHP backend with the content stored in an SQL database. There were ways to speed up the website (and many people have done this), but my site was getting slower.

My Options

I discovered the concept of static site generators (SSGs), and went on a journey to learn more about what they are.

I found a lot of people had followed a similar path, starting on WordPress then moving to a static site generator.

Essentially, these static site generators allow you to publish simple HTML files of your website.

This means they were fast, simple, and easy to use.

So, after looking into it, and some research, I decided to make the move.

My Setup

The setup of this site is now:

Markdown for the blog posts and pages
Hugo as a static site generator
GitHub repository for the website files (Markdown files and images)
Netlify for the hosting

It's fast, cheaper, easier, and brings me more joy.

Benefits

There are many benefits of this architecture:

Less expensive: I have a single cost now, which is Netlify. I'm currently on the Free plan but may increase to the Paid plan just to contribute to the company and handle any increases in bandwidth.
Security: The website is simply HTML pages with some CSS formatting, so it's much more secure. There are no logins to break into, no plugin maintenance issues that can break the website
Low maintnance: It's easier to update and maintain. I don't need to keep up to date with WordPress plugins and investigate any issues from plugin conflicts.
Backups: The blog posts are all Markdown files stored on GitHub, so there is a history of all of the changes made. This is helpful if there are issues with my site, or I break something, or I want to move.
Speed: The site is much faster to load now, which is better for website visitors and for me.
More enjoyable: I enjoy the process of writing in Markdown and committing and publishing on GitHub. It's a better experience, so I'm glad I can do it this way.

I plan to stick with this method for a long time, but I wanted to share my thoughts behind it.