basnotes

 

WordPress to Hugo

tip

When I started the graduation of my study Software Engineering in 2015, I was required to have a blog to log and share my findings with my university. At that time WordPress was an easy-to-setup and easy-to-use solution. That is still true, but it does have its disadvantages too.

As you know I have set up this site using Hugo, which has worked well for me so far. I recently checked out my graduation blog and found that things were no longer working as expected: it was running terribly slow, and some pages wouldn’t even render anymore! It seems the auto-update functionality of WordPress had worked, but some plugins weren’t upgraded in the process and failed to work.

In addition to the slowness and some pages being broken, I also read about vulnerabilities more and more…

Ah yeah, I almost forgot to mention that running WordPress also requires PHP and a MySQL/MariaDb backend, which is consuming valuable resources from my NUC based server… As opposed to this Hugo generated static website… ;)

TL;DR: I decided to move from the slow, high-maintenance, high-vulnerable WordPress blog to a blazingly fast, no-maintenance Hugo generated static web-site.

How?

There might be means to automate getting the content from a WordPress website and generate the Markdown files required for Hugo, but I didn’t bother to look for it. Instead, I just copy-pasted the text from the editor in the WordPress admin pages into Markdown files and re-did the text formatting, re-adding the links and images.

I had used this site as a base for the new site, so after copying all the content, I spent some time to change the design to more or less match the original design.

Where?

While I was hosting the original graduation blog on https://blog.familiehopman.net, I decided to move it to a new domain https://studie.familiehopman.net which better expresses the purpose of the site.

Conclusion

It took me several hours to move the content and setup the new Hugo based site, but I’m really happy with the result:

Ah! Now it is also mobile ready!

September 23, 2020