Why I Moved Away From WordPress!

• Wordpress
• HTML
• CSS
• JS
• jQuery

This is my first post on Medium so I guess an introduction is in order.

My name is Chirag and I’m a software engineer from Surat, Gujarat, India. I work as a full-time freelancer and I love developing web apps, mobile apps, and games.

Recently, I’ve been busy since few weeks setting up my blog 😒 and had too many choices to make. I started off with WordPress given that it is a highly recommended and reputed CMS around. But it doesn’t fit in all the use cases, at least not for me. So, I decided to share my experience with you guys.

WordPress is a great CMS. Probably the best one out there. (Personally, I didn’t like it very much.😓). No matter what kind of website you want to build, It can almost do anything and with almost no coding skills. You can build a company website, an online store, or even something fully customized kind of portal.

Then what went wrong? Why I moved away from it? WordPress is good or not? Why should I not use WordPress? Why WordPress is so slow? 🙈🙉🙊

Well, Overtime, All these questions were raised in my head and While WordPress can be a very easy one to use and all, The main thing that bugged me was that it’s slow as hell! I don’t know whether it was because I hosted it on an IIS server or something but damn it performed poorly! In 24 hours of log time, It gets offline like 4–5 times every day which is too bad for search engine optimization. 😵

Here is What I Expect In My Blog

1. It should have a very low requirement for hardware. 🤺
2. It should provide almost all search engine friendly features right out of the box. 📦
3. It should never ever go offline. At least 98% uptime should be there. 🛰
4. It should be very easy to customize without juggling between the developer’s documentation and website. 📃
5. It should be very lightweight and very high performant. Even with AWS EC2 Micro instance. 🏋️‍

I know It feels like high standards. It’s not actually. Because I’ve tried many platforms and I’ve seen the potential of them to be a perfect fit for authors to blog.

How To Find A Quality Framework?

Well, It kind of depends on what you are looking for. Mostly, You can recognize one by identifying the purpose of the platform. For example, Any platform that is developed around one single purpose has the potential to be the best because it reduces the scope and lets the developers focus on details which, makes it perfect eventually. ✈

WordPress was great for blogging but as it grew, They started adding more and more features to it which obviously increases its hardware requirements. 👷‍♂️ And you cannot always find a quality plugin for your needs which gave me headaches from time to time.

It’s still a great platform but not for people who want to just write and beginners don’t usually have a powerful server at their disposal.

Wix.com

I bet you came across wix.com during web surfing at least once. I found it while I was watching a video on YouTube. It was an Ad. So I thought of giving it a shot.

It’s a great platform. somewhat customizable. If you’re a developer, better, and if not, You won’t regret it.

I didn’t like it because of two reasons.

• I couldn’t find options to customize it on a deep level. And I didn’t want to spend time to learn it just to start blogging.
• Designing options are limited or I couldn’t find options to do so.

I tried Ghost

Man, I’m impressed! It was super easy to install, a bit tedious to install on IIS though but I had it up and running at the end of the day. The interface is clean and beautiful. I’ve kept using it for 4 months and have no disappointments so far. Even customization is very easy.

Here is my take on it, If you’re looking for a fast and lightweight blogging tool, Ghost is the best fit. It’s actually built for the people who just want to write.

Conclusion

I’m still looking around for the best framework built specifically for blogging only and I’m somewhere around the corner to reach my goal because I’m trying Jekyll at the moment and it seems promising so far.

I’m going to update this article for my study but till then, Stay tuned, and thanks for reading. 🖖