Aaand… back to WordPress

It finally happened. After years of trying out framework and technologies, I went back to the good old self hosted WordPress.

Using WordPress for blogging might be just a logical step to anybody who is not into web development (or just anybody with some common sense). It is however not such a simple step to take for a Web developer like me, since I naturally like to try out things. However after years of trying different technologies, I decided it was time to come back home, and this reflected almost instantaneously in the number of posts I create.

I have tried a lot of stuff over the years: static site generators with markdown (eleventy, really good solution and the one that I used the most), custom solutions with interesting choices for the frontend and cloud solutions for the backend (the previous iteration was using Remix and Firebase), WordPress as a headless CMS for a Single Page Application, wordpress.com, and of course the good old self-hosted WordPress website.

In the end, nothing beats hosting your own website on a good old hosting with WordPress, especially if you are capable of editing the website code (and if you are not, you can pay somebody to create a custom theme, or just use wordpress.com).

Here’s my reasoning

• I don’t want my posting to be held back by the choice of technology (so I want to make posting as easy and accessible as possible), on the go or from my PC.
• I want to be able to change my menus, add categories, edit descriptions, modify tags, without any coding and as easily as possible thanks to a great admin section.
• Good SEO out of the box.
• APIs are available if needed
• I can embed stuff in my posts (iframes, images, whatever) with ease
• Great media library for uploads management and image resizing
• I can schedule posts with ease, set them to private, set them to draft, etc
• I can add simple functionalities with a plethora of plugins
• Performance is good
• I retain full control on everything (looks, functionality, etc)
• Open source solution means I’m in control and owner of it all
• RSS built in, no need to reinvent the wheel
• I can deploy a new version of my theme when I push it to Git thanks to this action
• I can add an animated GIF of a mannekineko (Ok I could do this anyway)

I think these are pretty good points and the bottom line is that WordPress is making my life easier and I finally came to peace with that. Or maybe that’s a sign of getting older 😀 but really, I do not want to use my energy to keep changing the tech behind my blog, and I’d rather invest it in side projects.

Futhermore, I kind of hope the blog is coming back to regain its space against social networks, so this is a natural step for me.

"Sooo I switched my blog back to #wordpress and I wrote a post about the reasoning behind it"

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Photo by Souvik Banerjee on Unsplash