Leaving WordPress was kind of a mixed emotion. I am experienced with PHP, worked with it using Laravel for a good part of my early career but with static site generators on the rise, I decided after 12 years to move my site to Zola. I think Markdown is better for writing, and PHP is slower than static HTML.
I don't really have a lot of spare time these days but I was able to hand off a large part of the grunt work to Claude 4.6, this has taught me a few things about AI.
Why Zola
I decided that when moving to a static site, I didn't really want to pick up npm or work with node dependencies, or really have anything too complicated. I wanted the site to all run off a basic binary, and Zola was a good fit. I know it's not the most popular but it gets the job done.
I also am increasingly concerned about security, and I am starting to have quite a large homelab footprint and I wanted to really cut down on the amount of possible attack vectors. I know PHP and WordPress are fairly battle tested but the increasing frequency of security vulnerabilities in pretty major software had me concerned, and my website and its CMS is a large security risk which can be eliminated.
Another reason is that a large part of my site was starting to become bloat. I ran Google Adsense on the domain for 12 years and only really made about £60, which isn't even enough to pay the registrar fee. I decided it was time to pull the plug on Google, Cloudflare Beacon, WP-Cache, other WordPress plugins etc. I wanted to go thermonuclear on my site and make the site fast as possible, I'd done as much as possible on PHP, but I can do more. Ideally all this stuff never even hits my webserver and comes directly from Cloudflare.
I'll lose a few features, the editor, the statistics and the built-in newsletter, but I don't really use that in a business capacity anyway. This is just a blog for my rubbish you know? It goes back years, and it's all mostly crap barely worth reading.
The Migration Process
Okay, time for a full disclosure sort of thing here, this site was in large part built with AI. It's not written any of the text (yet) but basically all of the Zola templating, the CSS and the infrastructure was built with prompts and you know, pressing enter a lot.
I know, but I am impressed with the result and I take ownership of any mistakes it made. The site looks very fresh and basically identical to the WordPress theme before it. I also have some grand plans in future in mind. I had a good scan through and I don't see anything anymore it got wrong. There's some interesting comments here and there but nothing crazy. A lot of broken blocks are better than before too. I guess after 10+ years your site starts to build a lot of cruft.
Exporting from WordPress was sort of hard sort of easy, it's taken 2 months and 32 commits, but I am at the point now where I'm writing articles with it and it's working for my purposes, I was able to do this as a side of desk thing at nights and on the weekend in about 20 hours. I just had AI turn every page into markdown from the export, was actually kind of easy going.
Basically, for my site to still function with the old structure, I use Nginx and wrote a bunch of redirects. I wanted a better slug than /featured/post-abc that I set up when I was young.
I use a Gitea runner for my dev branch, work on changes to the site, can deploy locally to my laptop if I want, then when ready I can just push to main when ready. I had AI write all of that and I'm better for it.
The grand plans? I'm going to add running data to the site, may as well make it a bit more interesting and "About me" and I'm big into running at the moment so I think this is a good fit, and a challenge to code.
Well, that's it. Another successful weekend.
Aidan.