The website migration of mikaelahonen.com has completed!

Here is the background why I migrated my Wordpress site to Hugo framework that generates static websites.

8 years of blogging on Wordpress

I have been writing my personal blog on WordPress for 8 years.

During that time I ahve become increasingly more interested to simplify the structure, optimizing the performance, lowering the costs and modify the site myself.

Web hotel and website has too many functionalities

At the same time the site backend has become a behemont where majority of the functionalities are useless.

Also the web hotel had quite a lot of stuff that I never needed. All kinds of applications, weird automatically genereated files, domain records etc.

In my opinion a service or application should do one thing well. I would rather split my web hotel to multiple small services to understand how all individual pieces actually work.

I never felt urge to learn de-facto technologies such as Apache server or PHP profoundly. Once newer technologies would emerge, I would catch the wave and become pro with those.

Website costs increased steadily

I probably paid 50 USD per year for my web hosting when I started blogging.

Nowadays the sum is around 300 USD per year considering all infrastructure costs. Not a huge sum still, but I don’t like to pay from features I don’t use.

Website performance optimization has become more complex

Keeping the website performant is a hobby for me.

Even though my website has been relatively fast, there were too many extra steps and plugins. The geographical location of the visitor also played a significant role for the performance.

For Wordpress users convenience is more important than performance.

Full control of the site

I want to be in control of every detail of my site. If it takes same time for me to compare different plugins or implement a feature myself, why would I not make it exactly how I want?

I had a clear idea how the site structure, taxonomies, ordering and visual layout should be.

This could have probably been done by Wordpress, but as said, I wanted to have simpler approach.

Green development and privacy as a value

IT and data industries are polluted by resource hungry solutions that provide minimal value. At the same time a website might easily have tens of scripts tracking our every mouse move.

The new website is not using cookies or tracking you in any way. It records page loads fully anonymously. The pages are served close to user’s physical location from a resource pool that does not reserve dedicated capacity.

All the resources including fonts and external libraries are served from my own domain, so that you can not be tracked by the tech giants. Only Youtube videos are served from Google servers, but cookies are blocked also from those.

The external links in the blog posts are tagged with an icon to improve visitor privacy and secutiry. Commenting on the site does not require user account that would wulnerable to hacking.

Here you can read more about why I think green development will be in big demand in the future.

Website that lasts for the lifetime

Designing a new website and hosting setup is a time consuming task.

From earning perspective I definitely would made more money by working instead of tuning button margins of my custom made website theme.

In the end it is about the values. I hate cluttered solutions that do not have a clear focus. I hope my website will be here at least as long as I am.