I decided to move to WordPress (WP) as a blogging platform for several reasons.
- It’s recommended on e.g. reddit
- I decided that writing more/blogging would help me in coding/biz/marketing, so I needed a better platform to do this on
- It’s kinda fun to use WP
Previously, I was running my own custom portfolio/blog site on Next.js, with the blog content being pushed to GitHub. The pros of this approach was that I could experiment with new libraries and frameworks e.g. shadcn, or a horizontal loading bar. The cons of this was that it took a lot of time to manage my own website. Also using git | VSCode | Vercel workflow to edit blogs wasn’t the best solution (for example, no spell check in VSCode).
I decided to try WordPress.com, which worked great until I wanted to add a time to read plugin. It would have cost me even more money (creator plan), so I did some Googling and found that hosting WordPress on DigitalOcean was a viable alternative.
This required a bit of technical skill and following their tutorial but eventually it was working (fingers crossed).
Anyways, I hope you enjoyed reading about my decision to move to WordPress. It’s actually really fun to use the platform as you can swap themes in and out really fast (like Shopify), and even colors.
Pros
- fast to edit
- lots of plugins1
Cons
- might have some security issues (check plugins)2
- could be a good idea to add a plugin with extra security features like Wordfence to protect your site
Conclusion
Simplicity is cool.3 In DDIA, there’s a quote like
data outlives code4
WP makes it easy to write blog posts and share it with the world. If you’d like to learn how to setup WordPress on e.g. DigitalOcean, you can follow my tutorial too.
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