I failed.
but I had fun trying and learnt things, so I’m happy. For this blog I tried to use a static site generator, I thought it would make my blog simpler and allow me to post faster. I thought it would make my blog easier to host and easier to secure with no database to run. Here I am, installing WordPress again. So what went wrong? It turns out I really like the ability to log into a place to create content and post. Sure, I could create static content with markdown formatted text, but I had to remember the file format, remember how to link images (and upload them somewhere), then remember where I saved the generator script, and after all that, I didn’t get around to posting. The trigger to reinstall WordPress was actually needing something for my business site (roots.uk). We were hosting with Squarespace but I was finding it was slow delivering pages and Google’s webmaster tools were telling me we needed to better ‘or else’…
Anyway, installing WordPress was a breeze, a day of setup to manually copy all the content from the Squarespace pages to new WordPress pages. Then another day of optimisation and I went from a page speed score of something like 60/100 to 95/100. To be fair to SquareSpace part of the issue was linking to YouTube videos, which in turn requires a large amount of JavaScript download. I found a WordPress plugin calledWP-youtube-lyte that grabs the video thumbnail and makes it a clickable link to YouTube for visitors that press play.
Once I had WordPress for work, it was trivial to add WordPress alongside it for this blog, so I have, and here you are. As for the old content,well I might put that back into the wordpress database but for now and probably until the next code overhaul there’s an archive folder of the static pages that survived the migrations. I had a backup, so restoring the old site and adding the one static generated page into turned out to be easier than I expected.