Moving away from WordPress

WordPress

WordPress gave me my first professional web development job almost 7 years ago. Back then all agencies and bloggers where using WordPress to build easy to manage sites. Whether you had an ecommerce store or a small one-page site, setting up and developing was well documented and took a relativity small amount of time.

It's never been fully painless though. Being used on 39.5% of all websites it's an easy target for malicious hackers. Depending on your setup, you have to ensure all third-party plugins are maintained and up to date.

Single instances of WP sites have also posed issues with uptime and speed. The current WordPress host I use for all my clients has some great technology helping with caching and asset CDN uploads but even still, the site and DB is on a single instance in most cases which becomes a pretty serious single point of failure if you're not prepared.

The future is static

It's obvious the future is pushing swiftly towards serverless websites using technologies like Next or Vue . Utilising repos and git build tools we can develop and deploy sites rapidly to edge CDN networks around the world. You can also connect to cloud database services such as MongoDB Atlas allowing you to have multiple instances of your database in clusters and replicating across different locations.

Now we have tools like Next JS, we can build static HTML pages of our website ensuring crawlers and use experience isn't somewhat hacked together whilst retaining the awesome technology of React and Angular.

So what does this mean?

Well, I get asked this question a lot. The answer is, well it's subjective right now. It depends on what your building and what the needs are. Static sites are great for blogs and simple information sites but for larger projects pairing with legacy code, it might not be straight forward. Go with what you feel is right the project and place your code in a scalable and replicated environment.