Why Hugo?

Part 1 of Moving from WordPress to Hugo

I’ve been lucky with my WordPress installations - only a couple of malware infections in 15+ years. But the last one was extremely painful to fix - after I had re-installed every file in the deployment I finally found that the attack had manged to rewrite every post in the database with a link to an adware injector script.

Half a day of personal time to rebuild a site that I don’t want to close, but which hasn’t had a lot of use in the last couple of years, is just too much: the time had come!

This is not a novel idea - quite a few people have blogged ¹ about moving off WordPress to static generators, especially Hugo.

For me the key benefits are:

• much less vulnerable to malware
• lower hosting costs for a faster site
• simple text-editor creation of content
• content in Git (the code always has been)
• easy to keep multiple copies of content to avoid vendor lock-in
• Hugo is fast to generate the site, and very simple (single executable)
• free high-performance hosting from Netlify, GitHubPages and probably others