I’ve been a WordPress user since 2007, continuously maintaining personal writing sites. I grew along with the product, moving from a casual hobbyist suffering through the Famous 5-minute Install to a WordPress professional, making my living from the open source CMS.
And while WordPress is a solid foundation for many web projects, a blog isn’t one of them anymore. Often derided as being “just for blogs,” WordPress’s product roadmap has steadily veered further and further from a platform for low-volume sequential writing with each jazzy release. While it’s empowering for a non-technical writer to wield plugins to tweak their WordPress blog in any way they see fit, be they janky or no, plugins rarely fully satisfy out-of-the-box. WordPress could only be the writing tool for me because I knew what chaff to deactivate, uninstall, or otherwise work around to get a post published.
With the slapdash future that is Gutenberg in core, I started to seriously question maintaining a WordPress site for my web publishing endeavors. Plus, I missed the small technical hurdles of old WordPress, digging around in PHPMyAdmin to remedy some side effect I introduced to the codebase by installing a must-have social share button plugin. Was it worth the (admittedly small) annual cost for web hosting to prop up a shoddy McMansion when a 3-bedroom ranch would suffice?
I started searching around for no cost, no frills alternatives to blogging with WordPress and quickly Googled my way to GitHub Pages. With a little technical knowhow—or comfortability with following online tutorials—I could have a blog with no out-of-pocket costs (unless I chose to add a custom domain which, at the time of this writing, I have not done). Frankly, with the ebb and flow of my article publishing, it didn’t make sense to me to spend any money to have a website up and running.
Moving from WordPress to GitHub Pages
While I could manually hardcode every piece of my publishing process, I chose the static site generator Jekyll to provide templates for my soon-to-be site. There are oodles of online tutorials for setting up a GitHub Pages blog using Jekyll, so I’m not going to detail all my steps here. Rather, I do have a few broad pieces of advice.
Note: Since this original posting, I have swapped out Jekyll for Hexo then Hugo then Gatsby then Svelte and now (Jan 2023) back to GitHub Pages. Why? I am trying to keep it simple and keep forgetting to do that when something shiny comes along.
If you embark on migrating your WordPress blog to GitHub Pages, know that you will make a lot of false starts. Rather than starting with the site content migration, take the time to get comfortable generating a Jekyll-powered GitHub Pages site using the command line. You don’t have to use the command line but it’s kinda cool and not as scary as you may think.
I created a GH Pages site again and again, testing out this tutorial and that Jekyll theme again and again and again until I was fully satisfied with what I created.
From there, I had to get all of my content out of WordPress in a Jekyll-ready fashion. I wound up using the Jekyll Exporter plugin, which extracted all of my posts, pages, and media in no time. The only snag I found was in how image tags were structured inside articles; the URL path was incorrect. A find-and-replace in my IDE took care of this hurdle rather painlessly.
So now I have a no-cost online presence that scratches my writer itch as well as my web dev inclinations. For me, it’s the best of both worlds.