Moving back from Jekyll to WordPress

A few years ago I shared that I will be moving away from WordPress to Jekyll – a static site generator. I have decided to move back to WordPress. Here are the reasons for moving back.

• My source code is stored in a repository. If I need to work on the website, I’m limited to what device I can use to work on it. I want to be able to switch between my computers and tablets. There are times I’d like to work off my phone. There isn’t really a good way to do this.
• I didn’t like having to go through a deployment every time I wanted to publish a new entry. I do have a workflow that handles deployment but just thinking about deployment every time I wanted to publish was impractical to me.
• I used Disqus to handle the commenting system and it messed up the synchronization between their system and mine. There are alternatives but the implementation is the same and there’s a good chance that the problem will come up even if I use something else.
• WordPress will do a better job that I can with SEO-related things. They have a large community that can help bring attention to my blog as well.
• I don’t have to clone the repository if I’m on a new machine. I don’t have to teach my wife how the development process is when she wants to blog. She just logs in and types.

So why WordPress? Why not use a different solution. Well, I’ve been using WordPress since 2006. I feel the software is great and there is a large community for support. I am also familiar with the platform. I don’t want to learn anything new. I just want to go back in and write content.

Going back to WordPress, I will be missing a few things.

• The speed with loading HTML pages. I guess I’ll have to find themes that are lighter weight or not worry about it.
• No more hosting off Amazon S3 with Cloudfront CDN. For the amount of traffic I was getting, it was very affordable. Moving back to a PHP environment will increase cost a little bit. But I’m already hosting other web applications anyway, so no cost increase. I’ll utilize the same server until I need to increase resources. I’ll still use S3 and Cloudfront for assets hosting.
• I didn’t have to use a database to store data, now I do. The different? Security. I’ll have to tighten up and do regular maintenance. Again, I’m already running web applications, I’ll just add the blog to the list I’m already managing.

Hopefully, moving back to WordPress, I will be creating more content than in the past few years. I’m hoping to do more videos as well. If you have ideas you’d like me to check out, please let me know.