Why I replaced my WordPress site with Hugo

Introduction

I have been meaning to write something on my personal website again for quite a while. And, as usual, I keep promising myself that this time I will really pick it up properly. Only to publish nothing for months on end. By now, I know that pattern all too well. Still, this moment feels different. Not because I suddenly developed better discipline, but because the foundation of my site has changed. And that foundation brings a sense of calm.

For years, my personal website ran on WordPress. It worked fine. It did what it needed to do. But gradually, something started to bother me. Not the content, but the technology. The site became slower, heavier, and more complex. And I noticed that I was enjoying it less and less. Eventually, I decided to change direction and move to Hugo.

This post is not a rant against WordPress. Nor is it an attempt to convince everyone to switch to static sites immediately. It is simply a personal story. About making choices. About simplicity. And about rediscovering enjoyment in something that once started as a hobby.

Years of WordPress

WordPress has given me a lot. I have built countless websites with it, for myself and for others. I have helped people, solved problems, written plugins, and customised themes. I have given talks and taken part in discussions. The platform and its community have shaped me. That does not disappear overnight.

For my personal website, WordPress was a logical choice for a long time. Quick to set up, easy to maintain, and flexible enough to do what I wanted. But over the years, the amount of work required just to display a simple page kept increasing. Themes, plugins, builders, optimisations, caching layers, security measures. All well intentioned, but together they formed an increasingly heavy stack.

Yes, some of that is my own doing. You can keep WordPress relatively lean if you try. But even then, it remains a dynamic system that has to do a lot of work on every page load. For a site that mainly consists of text, that started to feel less and less logical.

Feeling the slowness

Speed is a strange subject. Until you truly experience the difference, it often seems acceptable. A few hundred milliseconds here, an extra request there. But over time, it creeps in. Pages that just do not feel snappy. An admin interface that becomes slower and slower. Updates you postpone because you cannot be bothered with the potential hassle.

For my personal site, I wanted the opposite. Something that is always fast. That requires no ongoing maintenance. That cannot break because of a plugin update I barely even use. A site that does exactly what it should do: display text. Quickly and reliably.

Discovering Hugo

The move to Hugo was not a spur-of-the-moment decision. I had been looking at static site generators for quite some time. Jekyll, Eleventy, Astro, and others. Hugo kept standing out as a fast, mature, and pragmatic option. No frills, but excellent performance.

The first steps took some getting used to. No database. No admin interface. No clickable buttons to “quickly tweak something”. Everything happens in Markdown, with front matter, directory structures, and build commands. At first, it feels bare. Especially if you come from the WordPress world.

But after that initial phase, something shifted. The complexity did not disappear, but it became explicit. Visible. Understandable. I once again knew exactly where everything lived and why it behaved the way it did.

Markdown and mental clarity

Writing in Markdown turned out to be surprisingly pleasant. No distractions. No editor constantly showing how things will look. Just text and structure. Headings are headings. Links are links. Everything else follows naturally.

That simplicity is liberating. I spend less time thinking about presentation and more time focusing on content. Exactly what I want for a personal blog. No more discussions with myself about fonts, margins, or blocks. The site is readable. Full stop.

Absurdly fast

And then there is the speed. To be honest, it is almost absurd. Pages load instantly. No database queries. No PHP. No runtime logic. Just HTML served directly.

Once you get used to that, it is very hard to go back. Not just for visitors, but for me as well. I know that whatever I publish will always be fast and stable. Without tuning. Without plugins. Without extra layers.

Less polished, but better

Is Hugo less polished than WordPress? Yes. Absolutely. There is no visual editor. No live preview in the browser while you type. No “click here and it works”.

But that polish turned out not to be essential for me. What matters is the result. A website that is easy to read. Accessible to everyone. Fast on every device. Without unnecessary ballast.

I am more than happy to give up a bit of convenience if it means the foundation is solid.

More sites will follow

It did not stop with my personal website. Now that I experience how pleasant this way of working is, I am converting other sites to Hugo as well. Not everything, and not for everyone. But certainly where it makes sense.

For content-driven sites, documentation, and personal projects. Anywhere dynamic behaviour is not really needed, but historically ended up there anyway.

And what about WordPress?

Is this a definitive goodbye to WordPress? No. Not at all. I will continue to support the community. I will keep helping people. I will still use WordPress where it fits. For friends, for projects that genuinely need a CMS with users and workflows.

But for my own personal use, that chapter is closed. Not out of disappointment, but out of clarity. I now have a much better understanding of what I need. And that is no longer WordPress.

Finally

Maybe I will start writing more often now. Maybe I will not. I know myself well enough not to make any promises there. What I do know is that the barrier has become much lower. The technology no longer gets in the way. The site feels like it is mine again.

And that alone makes the switch more than worthwhile.