I would say that 80% of the websites I’ve built or worked on used Wordpress as their CMS. It’s easy to use, there are tons of plugins and themes to customize the site, and because it’s so ubiquitous, third party tools have an incentive to integrate their services. But, I’m not using Wordpress in favor of this static website that is…

• Coded with ES6 and React.js
• Compiled into static HTML files with react-static
• Hosted on Netlify
• Styled by Tachyons.io
• Uses NetlifyCMS as a CMS
• Uses Mailchimp for Email
• Uses Facebook Comments for Comments
• Uses Algolia for searching through posts

So why not Wordpress?

The Technology

As a preface, Wordpress uses the LAMP technology stack (the Linux Operating System, the Apache Web Server, the MySQL Database, and the PHP scripting language). This website uses Netlify CDN Hosting, and plain HTML files.

The Wordpress setup obviously has a little more complexity when it comes to making a website pop up on our screens. LAMP is like…

• going to a restaurant,
• looking at the menu,
• telling the waiter what you want,
• the waiter telling the chef what you want,
• the chef cooking your meal,
• and the waiter return the meal to your table.

CDN Hosting + HTML Files is like…

• going to a gas station and

• pulling out one of those pre-made, packaged, refrigerated sandwiches they put next to the Gatorades.

  LAMP is way fancier, but CDN+HTML is faster.

The Reasons

With that background, here are a few reasons I didn’t use Wordpress, ranked from least to most important.

• (4th) Website Speed
  • The actual speed difference between LAMP vs HTML is noticeable, but isn’t really important for this blog. This is more like a journal that forces me to verbalize and polish my thoughts. Whether this page loads in 1 or 3 or 6 seconds isn’t really critical. So, speed is a nice benefit I don’t actually need.
• (3rd) Control
  • Because this is hand coded, I have ultimate flexibility on how I want the site to look and features I want it to have. BUT, because I don’t really need anything unique, I probably could’ve recreated the site to pretty close to how I wanted on Wordpress using themes and plugins. Another nice benefit I don’t actually need.
  • On the other hand, I know Javascript, but not PHP. So when it comes to anything being buggy or trying to create a custom solution in the future, I have the ability to do so on this javascript-built website. I’d be stuck on PHP-built Wordpress
• (2nd) Cost
  • For the same reasons that make CDN + HTML faster, it is also cheaper to manage. So several companies are willing to host your website for free, and in my case, I use Netlify. This is much better than having to pay 4 dollars a month for cheap bluehost shared hosting
• (1st) Learn
  • The big reason for all of this is to learn to use these tools. I’m bullish on these tools as important to master for upcoming projects.
    • React.js, (here’s why[1])
    • Algolia (here’s why[1]) and
    • Netlify (here’s why[1])
  • Also, because these have been so easy to get started with, I think they’re good tools to know as well
    • Tachyons.io is a tool that for the first time makes me not want to gouge my eyes out when I’m doing CSS.
    • React-Static has been easy to use, debug, and customize, in comparison to Gatsby.

Conclusion

I think skills with these tools will help me both build and recruit for upcoming projects, specifically NimbleGov, more than Wordpress could.

Footnotes:

[1] Coming Soon