It’s been long years since I used WordPress in 2006 as my blogging platform, back in the old days there’s nothing can beat what WordPress offers for bloggers. So many themes, plugins, and It’s still the most-used and well-known blogging platform until now.
According to W3Techs Survey, WordPress is used by 63.6% of all the websites whose content management system we know. This is 38.3% of all websites. Every year’s website powered by WordPress is significantly rising.
I miss the old days when WordPress was a pretty damn simple software that is very good at what it does, but nowadays the word “simple” is not included in the WordPress dictionary anymore. WordPress is evolving bigger and bigger each day, even a basic installation requires maintenance. Themes, plugins, a database, the server, regular and multiple backups. All demand your attention. I ended up spending too much time configuring the system’s moving parts rather than focus on my content.
No, I’m not embracing people to move from WordPress. WordPress is a masterpiece, plus its open-source, and has a vibrant community around it. It does just not suit anymore for my need, a simple blog. And then so I heard Jekyll, a simple static site generator which has no requirements for a database, no need a server, no need an interpreter (PHP, Python, Nodejs, etc), no backend, no WYSIWYG editor, much simpler and It is much less powerful than WordPress in many aspects but it offers me what I need more simply.
You can write your content in any text editor in Markdown Syntax, no visual editor like in WordPress. Surprisingly, your writing process will be much more quickest than using the visual editor.
As a developer, installing Jekyll is a breeze for me, it does require some technical knowledge such as ruby gem, npm, git, FTP, etc. I’m not sure if a common blogger can do this alone without guidance from any tech-savvy. Because Jekyll by itself is not a blogging or cms platform, it’s a static site generator that will generate HTML files for you which you can upload later on to your hosting provider by FTP.
I choose Jekyll because it has a lot of community and is very actively developed. No need Caching anymore, no need WP-Super-Cache, no need updating your wp-core anymore, no need to worry when your site goes down, and its a pretty damn fast blog ever, you may test it with the google page speed tool.
