Funnily enough, querying this article’s title in any search engine generates a flood of results for the exact opposite case — webmasters abandoning WordPress in favor of the static site generator Hugo. I did the same about six months ago to refresh my personal website right before publishing my book.

My main motivations in switching to Hugo were:

1. To improve resource efficiency. My website’s home page shrank by over 80%, from around 1 MB of resources to just 187 kB.
2. To be able to write and publish posts natively in Markdown. I love Markdown, and in fact I wrote my entire book using it.
3. To host a website for dirt cheap; Cloudflare Pages allows one to host a static website for free. I was only paying $1 per month to register my domain.

My Hugo site achieved all of these goals. What was there to dislike?

When I started my personal website, I never really planned to do much writing on it. The first iteration of my site was essentially just an online résumé built in WordPress. The second iteration (the Hugo site) I planned to post on two to three times per year, essentially only when I had some sort of announcement related to one of my personal projects.

Recently though, I started getting ideas for things that I’d like to blog about. My continuing journey of digital minimalism, the ever-worsening state of the internet, or whatever eclectic topic that I care about that month. I’m not ready to start writing another book yet, these topics don’t really work on my finance blog, and I don’t need a third website. So I might as well use this one. Expect one or two posts per month moving forward.

This is where the start of my issues with Hugo began. That phrasing of “my issues” was intentional, because these really aren’t any faults of Hugo’s. I am not a programmer. I have a general technical aptitude and I understand the basic fundamentals of coding, so I can figure out how to get CSS to output something looking how I want given enough time and an internet search engine.

“If I’m going to use my blog more, it sure would be cool to add a comment section!” I thought. And Hugo had several options. Disqus was disqualified immediately due to being bloated and slow.

Cactus Comments installed relatively painlessly but offered no option of automatic spam filtering. This was a no-go since my other site gets dozens of spam comments per week that are caught by Akismet.

I then tried Staticman which does offer spam detection and actually integrates with Akismet’s API. After three hours of trying to edit my theme’s HTML files to add the comment partials, I had to admit that I had fallen flat on my face.

Commento actually seemed really neat and easy to integrate with Hugo, but $10 per month for a commenting tool that I wasn’t even sure if anybody would use seemed steep. I could upgrade my WordPress hosting to an unlimited number of domains for cheaper. Which gave me an idea born out of frustration…

I began messing around with re-building my website in WordPress locally on my machine. 90 minutes later, I had a nicer-looking yet still-minimal site that came with a commenting feature out of the box (this site uses the wpOcean theme). And I finally got the sidebar that I had been struggling on-and-off to add to my Hugo site.

My home page is currently 958 kB instead of 187 kB, but that still seems reasonable — recently, looking up pizza dough recipes brought me to a blog with a homepage weight of 12 MB! One can still fight against web bloat in WordPress via image optimization, tactful choice of theme, and avoiding an over-reliance on plugins.

Why did I ditch Hugo for WordPress? Because I’m not competent enough at coding, and I’d rather be writing than messing around with CSS and HTML.