hugo-logo

At long last, I got around to do something I had been meaning to do for a very long time. I migrated this Wordpress blog over to a statically generated site powered by Hugo.

That's 6 years or over 300 posts worth of content.

Why not stay with Wordpress?

First of all, I wanted to move away from Wordpress because it's heavy and requires quite a bit of setup: PHP, database, plugins and so on. Markdown based static site generators have been around for a while and being able to keep everything in plain text and under a familiar source control system such as Git is awesome.

I use git and Markdown all the time both at home and at work.

Why Hugo?

Hugo is an open source static site generator written in Go. It's cross-platform and ships as a dependency free binary. Comprehensive documentation, wide range of themes as well as active and helpful community are great additions.

Whilst Jekyll was the more established solution, it required Ruby and I really wanted to keep my environment as simple as possible.

Other alternatives lacked features, support, had a more complex setup or a combination of the former.

We've got a winner!

Exporting Wordpress content

The process went on like this.

  1. Exported all posts and pages to XML with the standard Wordpress Export tool.
  2. Used Exitwp to convert content to Markdown.
  3. Lots of regex search and replace in Sublime.

Back in 2010 I used the WYSIWYG editor in Wordpress and later on I moved to use the Markdown module in Jetpack. The mix really confused Exitwp and required me to do a lot of manual editing and that took quite a while.

Pushing to production

This excellent tutorial proved most useful to get a streamlined publishing pipeline.

Essentially, this involved the following:

  1. Install Hugo on my production server
  2. Put the site sources in a local git repository
  3. Create a git bare repository in the production server
  4. Add a post-receive hook on the production repository that runs hugo and builds the site.

Give the article a proper read if you want to know more. The publish hook also uses rsync to back everything up in case something goes amiss.

To create a new post, test it locally and publish it, I simply do:

hugo new post/category/name.md
hugo serve --buildDrafts
git add content
git push prod

Results

So far I love it!

Here are some poor man's stats on loading times for the homepage, mind that I haven't tried to optimized neither of the two.

  • Wordpress: ~3.7s
  • Hugo: ~2.1s

Please, let me know if you find anything broken, I would really appreciate it!