Migrating My Blog to Hugo & Netlify

Don’t get me wrong. Wordpress is great.

When I started to take blogging seriously a few months ago, I decided to keep things as simple as possible. I think that Wordpress.com was a good choice at that time. I could focus on content, and not worry too much about anything else. The nice HTML editor allowed me to do pretty much everything I wanted to do, and I am not ashamed of uisng an HTML editor!

But I soon realised that it was a bit of an overkill for what I was doing. I was paying for the premium features and hardly using any of those.

I looked around for alternatives, and finally settled for the zero-cost combo of Netlify and Hugo.

I love the workflow. I write my posts in VSCode, preview them locally using Hugo’s built-in server, and push changes to my Github repo. Netlify builds and deploys the whole thing in seconds. You get 300 build minutes and 100GB bandwidth per-month from Netlify. I don’t think I’ll ever need more than that.

There were a few steps involved in migration from Wordpress. The Hugo theme that I am using needed some tweaks. It’s not the most elegant theme in the world though, and I’ll probably change it soon, but it works for now. I also wanted to retain the url schemes of my site on Wordpress.com. All the tweaks and content migration took me a couple of hours. DONE!

Hugo obviously offers much more than what I am currently using. I will keep exploring, and right now I am loving the new workflow and the blazing fast speed.