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Why I haven’t migrated my site to WordPress fully

  • IT

This is probably something which someone may question at some point so here are the main reasons why I’m not (or currently haven’t) migrated my website into a WordPress or Content Managed Website

 

  1. Entire site needs rebuilding
    1. To migrate my website I’d have to modify a lot of code and go through all the articles again, quite frankly can’t be arsed. Also to have the site how I want it I would need to rebuild all of my website, and given the problem I’ve had moving between hosts, it would break everything meaning I’d have to fix it again and resubmit all site links to Google and generate new sitemaps.
  2. Static HTML suits me for the content I write
    1. Articles I write are DIY guides, I like the fact how they’re laid out within HTML and it’s just nice and simple. No OTT designs, or OTT in general. Just nice simple information which loads quickly what the end user wants
  3. Blogs are more for content which updates regularly
    1. Articles that I write are generally updated / created as and when I have to fix something on my car, I don’t really write very often, unless it’s crap. So doesn’t really suits me
  4. Static HTML is easier for me in terms of placement of pictures
    1. I don’t need to modify the code much, I just put in a simple HTML table, and insert the picture. If I wanted it somewhere specific I could have a little bit of CSS coding into the page. Having it on a WordPress/CMS system makes it annoying as a lot of my articles are full width and I’m yet to find one I like which makes it easier to add pictures and have them placed where I like. Plus uploading pictures is a chore as I have to upload them to a gallery then insert from gallery. Rather than just dump everything into an /images folder and simply hotlink from there
  5. Low server requirements
    1. My website if running on static HTML barely uses any resources. Websites running PHP/MySQL can be resource intensive, whereas a website designed to run nothing but static HTML could potentially hosts thousands/millions of websites on the same server because static HTML is reguarly cached and loads quickly
  6. More secure
    1. Whilst not impossible, it’s generally a lot easier and more secure when using HTML sites, because there is nothing happening in the background for pages to be loaded such as database or PHP requests. Pages are simply served, so it locks down the security a bit better as the hackers would have to be able to modify the direct HTML file itself
  7. Faster backups
    1. This is a bit irrelevant really because I can’t download my backups until I’ve created them, but the larger your site is the longer it takes, having a small website means it’s backed up within minutes, instead of being up to 1 hour on a larger size, HTML compresses very well too for backups which makes it quick to download. Useful if I’m on a low speed connection
  8. Easier to troubleshoot
    1. Whenever I get problems with HTML, it’s fairly easy, it’s displayed on the screen. You either make an error and it doesn’t work, or it works fine. You can make HTML pages look amazingly modern and very stylish by using basic .CSS stylesheets. If you run a site with WordPress or CMS, you have to have MySQL, CSS, PHP and a few other things. Usually a simple change can break your code which gives you hours of headaches. I’ve had to fix my site often so I’m familiar with the layout of it now
  9. Low disk space usage
    1. When my website only has HTML pages. It doesn’t consume much disk space. An average HTML page is around 5KB in size. So adding some pictures (reduced in size / compressed to around 100KB) and basic CSS, I could have an entire website with 100+ pages that only consumed 50-200MB of disk space with very low requirements and would be very responsive. HTML pages also load really quickly, because it’s basically text and nothing else. Nothing requires rendering or any function calls in the background which talk to database. It just has a request and serves it to the end user straight away. Whilst disk and file compression is possible on dynamic sites, putting everything into wordpress just increases the overall size due to the databases and PHP aspect of everything

 

Eventually, when I find something I like the entire site will be migrated. The PROS of having a WordPress or CMS based website outweight the CONS, but for the time being I can’t be arsed.

Until I find something which suits the purposes and how I write my articles I’ll just keep going as needed then eventually change it over when I have it how I like it. Content becomes easier to maintain and increases my score in Google overall, so it will be done for end benefit