I have been using WordPress for a very long time now, and have been happy with it. One down side of wordpress is you have lots of patches to apply, update plugins and running my own wordpress with all the security issues seem like such an old idea. Yes, of course you can choose to a hosting provider to host wordpress by others but being old fashioned I like to own my own things and tinker around things. Therefore I started to look at alternatives to see what the new CMS and javascript landscape has to offer. I remember when I was speaking at ForwardJS in Ottawa, Gatsby kind of caught my attention.
What is Gatsby?
From their website it states “Gatsby is a blazing fast modern site generator for React.” React cool right? So I thought why not try out React and see where we go from here. Thus this is the journey of moving my wordpress site to Gatsby. I wanted to go really step by step process rather than having someone tell you 3 quick ways to move or get rich scheme. I want this to be a journey in order for us to learn what it really takes to move a wordpress site to Gatsby.
What are the advantages of moving
One thing to note and to understand is that Gatsby is not really a CMS it’s a site generator, so it will be in React but generating html files with JavaScript/React on top. When once tries to serve these html file from a CDN then it will super fast. Example AWS S3 to serve the static website. Not to mention the price of serving static web content is way cheaper than running a webserver on linux with mysql database. Last but not least I can write blog post with Markdown rather than using the wordpress UI to login and write my post, I will be able to write even offline 🙂
What are the disadvantages?
Since it will be static website there are no comments, unless you use third party e.g Disqus and Facebook Comments using javascript to embed it. The downside is there will be ads, which sucks. You can run a simple nodejs site with postgres on Heroku or use git comments. I plan to use git comments and lets see how that goes.
Summary
In my next blog post I will get started on our journey and learn a bit more about Gatsbyjs and how we plan to migrate from wordpress and build in gatsby.