Saturday 19 September 2026

Bye Bye Wordpress

I've just migrated this blog from a self hosted Wordpress site to a custom system based on static MarkDown files that are stitched together with Eleventy. It had been running on Wordpress since I started it in 2006. Wordpress has been pretty cool through that time. I seamlessly migrated to each new version and had a few changes of theme to refresh how it looked. Wordpress runs a ridiculous proportion of websites - something like 40%! It is objectively a good system. So why have I migrated away?

Wordpress became way more complex and, for my use, it jumped the shark when the Gutenberg editor became the default in 2018. It has just taken me eight years to do something about it! Since Gutenberg the number of commercial themes and plugins has rocketed so that any extension to the site now comes with attempts to up-sell to the "pro" version. There used to be free, simple themes and plugins that just did the job. These probably still exist but the are buried under commercial cruft. Finally my very cheap ISP runs the Wordpress database incredibly slowly. I just want to display some text and a picture or two but it took ages to load. When I went to update the theme again my heart sank and I grasped the nettle to move away from a dynamic site altogether.

I'm not saying goodbye to Wordpress altogether. I'm still responsible for a self hosted site at my work and another hosted on Wordpress.com. When I retire the former will be someone else's responsibility and the latter is run commercially anyhow.

To do the move to MarkDown I used this utility https://github.com/lonekorean/wordpress-export-to-markdown. Thank you lonekorean and other contributors. Then I did a lot of cleaning and styling and incorporated my landing pages that are more of a gallery than a blog - something that would have been a pain in Wordpress.

I hope this cleaner system will inspire me to write more. I certainly plan to write a blog before I make a YouTube video again.