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Why I move from WordPress to Netlify

It’s not because WordPress is bad, or I hate it. In fact, I am a huge fan of WordPress, and I still consider it one of my favorite CMS. I also bet most of the people who don’t know much about HTML and CSS, would prefer to have a site running with WordPress. So, here’s why I move from WordPress to Netlify.

The problem for me is it is overkill .

If I still run my personal blog (this site) on WordPress, I would have to:

  • pay for a decent web host. Tried with NameCheap for their cheapest plan at that time ($9.95/year). It’s honestly slow and I notice several downtimes when the traffic grew up a little bit.

  • pay for SSL certs. I know, nowadays it’s free and I should not pay for it. Hold on this, I’ll explain this later.

  • keep my WordPress version to the latest version.

  • optimize it because it’s too big for a small site like mine.

  • deal with comments and eventually, spammed comments. Even if I disable the comment, it just feels not right because the feature is there and I don’t use it. I hate to have something not useful in my inventory. Even when I put up Akismet plugins, I still saw some spam get passed because it looks like an original comment.

  • keep all of the plugins up to date.

  • do a lot of other works to tweak, improve, tinker, etc.. because I just love it. Lol.

And when I had moved to Netlify, here are some reasons and benefits I got.

  • It’s allowing me to host my small, personal blog for free.

  • It’s giving me free SSL, donated by Let’s Encrypt. No need to get my hands dirty to set up the SSL because I only need to point my domain’s nameserver to Netlify, and their system took care of the rest. Cool!

  • It’s blazing fast (despite I am on its free tier plan). But this probably because they only allow us to host static’s site. So far, I never got any notifications from Pingdom about downtime, not even 1 minute of downtime which I always get at least once in a week when the site was hosted on NameCheap.

  • I can publish my new post with git through Bitbucket, Github, or Gitlab.

  • Even if I need a CMS, I can use their Netlify-CMS. It’s easy to set up.

  • It’s giving 100GB bandwidth for free tier plan. Quite enough for my site, at least for now.

  • It’s allowing me to have a bare static site where I only wrote it on HTML, CSS, and a bit of Javascript.

  • I had no need to mess up with the server’s configuration.

  • No need to set up the database.

  • Netlify deployed my new updates which pushed to Github, quite fast. I can see the updates on my sites within seconds.

  • Netlify also supports the most popular blog platform for devs: Jekyll.

  • Netlify provided the way to capture user’s data using their form. I haven’t tried this feature yet, but it’s quite useful in case I need to collect some user’s data. It’s a nice replacement for restricting me to write any server side’s scripts like PHP or Ruby.

  • I only need to pay the domain for the site. No need to pay anything else when running my site on Shopify. Pretty useful when you’re on a tight budget but still want to run a small, personal site to represent yourself on the internet.

But, there are also some drawbacks after I move it to Netlify:

  • I can’t run the server’s side script if I need. Luckily, I have no need for this, at least for now.

  • I can’t run any database there.

  • That means, I can’t run AWStats, my favorite server’s sidetracking analytics to accompany my Google Analytics scripts on the client’s side.

  • I need to set up their Netlify form if I am going to allow more contributors to post on this site.

For you or not?

Netlify is probably not for you unless you’re:

  • a developer or

  • someone who’s willing to learn how to set it up or

  • a blogger with a budget to hire someone to set it up for you, along with its Netlify-CMS

But it’s for you if you:

  • love simplicity

  • love to have a static site

  • hate to see bloated, many unused features on WordPress when you’re using it as your site’s CMS.

  • only need to have a static site

  • are the only contributor of the site and you’re familiar with HTML, CSS, and the likes

  • feel it’s not worth to pay some web hosts only to host your personal, chit chat site.

  • feel it’s not worth the time to set up the SSL, even though you got the certs for free.

  • think WordPress is overkill for your personal site ( just like me )

  • don’t want to use a WordPress site

  • don’t need to use a WordPress site because you only post once in a week, or barely, just like me.

  • have other WordPress sites that belong to your clients and had very little to no time to take care of yours.

Do you need to move your site to Netlify, just like me? Not really.

Thanks, for reading.


Categories: WordPress  

Tags: netlify wordpress   wordpress