World of Matthew
Est. 2015
Mobile Menu

WordPress Is Overkill For 99% Of Blogs

Posted in: Archive

Notice: This article has been archived from worldofmatthew.info. Article has been edited with basic grammar correction.

Since web 2.0 became a thing back in 2007, many people moved their blogs to WordPress. The likely reason for people moving their blogs to WordPress is a convenience as back when blogs were called “web blogs” people had to add a create an HTML page manually (Often from a blank post template) if they wanted to add a new post, this does not include having to update links to point to their new blog post.

After reading the introduction, you may think that WordPress is the best thing since sliced bread, but I am going to go over some problems caused by the use of WordPress on normal blogs and what you should use instead.

  1. WordPress security annoyance’s If you have ever used WordPress, then you will know just how annoying it is to keep up with security updates for the core programme, themes and scripts. The WordPress Foundation has tried to make it easier to keep the core software up to date by introducing automatic update but these automatic updates are sometimes known to be unreliable, meaning you have to be sure WordPress has updated and has not just bugged the installer (Automatic updates don’t cover themes or plugins).

  2. WordPress is extremely slow. WordPress is very reliant on PHP and MySQL. This means that between the time to query and the time it takes for PHP to render that page into HTML, your website, your WordPress Blog could take several seconds to load, which is not ideal.

  3. WordPress is expensive to host. Because of the HTML pages rendering as explained in the last section, WordPress is extremely heavy on server resources. This means that cheaper hosts will kick you off if your website gets popular on Reddit.

So, what should you use for your blog? Well, the answer to that question would be to use a static site generator. The reason most people don’t use static site generators is that when they see anything that looks remotely like coding they run away, even tho the “coding” is just some markdown that anyone could learn in a few hours.

What are the advantages of using a static site generator?

  1. Static websites are super secure. Pretty much every static site generator output HTML files. In case you don’t know, HTML files don’t run code on a server at all, meaning that you can leave a static website online for years without ever updating it, unlike dynamic websites.

  2. The lack of need to update static websites allows websites like 3riversstadium.com to stay online even tho that website has not been updated since 1998. If you tried to leave a WordPress website without maintenance, it would be quickly be hacked.

  3. Static websites are ridiculously easy to host. You know all the issues I was talking about hosting a WordPress website? Well, with a static website, a server does not have to render your website from a database or from a PHP file (HTML is rendered by the client side). This means you can host your static on pretty much any website, including free ones (You would get kicked off a lot of hosts if your WordPress site got a lot of traffic suddenly).

Static Websites are extremely fast. Downloading a file is super quick compared to having to wait for a server to fetch the information from a database and rendering it.

Lastly, people should always put security over convince with owning and managing a blog. People moved away from static websites because they were extremely hard to keep track off and almost impossible to do any major changes to, but nowadays there are solutions like Hugo (As used on worldofmatthew.info) and Jekyll (If you want to deal with Ruby) that allow you to use a markdown language to generate your website thus getting rid of the past issues associated with static sites, without giving up any of the advantages.


Published: 11th November 2017

House Home Page
Notepad The Blog
Computer Technology
Speech Bubble Matthew's Reviews
Handhold Gaming Device Matthew's Gaming World
Onion Tor (Onion Site)
Subscribe to RSS