Almost no Blogs Need WordPress

[Paul Hunt]

Most people are being wasteful by using a WordPress install for their personal blogs, this is unnecessary.

Most people would be far better off by using a static solution like Hugo or Jekyll and just using an externally hosted comment websites like Disqus as with a WordPress install you have a lot of maintenance from security updates to keep your database optimized which would save you a lot of time and gets rid of the risk of having your website closed by your host because someone found a security hole in it.

[Nathan]

Hmm...not sure I agree.  You get so much more with WordPress from an SEO standpoint alone.

[Paul Hunt]

40 minutes ago, Nathan said:

Hmm...not sure I agree.  You get so much more with WordPress from an SEO standpoint alone.

As most people starting blogs are noobs, having them be responsible for keeping a piece of software and a bunch of plugins up to date is a recipe for disaster. With Hugo, you don't have to keep anything up to date and that is what is better for most people.

And what in SEO can you not do with Hugo?

[Nathan]

Link me to Hugo, I'd like to take a look at how they markup their pages and Schema Data.

[Ash]

2 hours ago, Paul Hunt said:

As most people starting blogs are noobs, having them be responsible for keeping a piece of software and a bunch of plugins up to date is a recipe for disaster. With Hugo, you don't have to keep anything up to date and that is what is better for most people.

And what in SEO can you not do with Hugo?

Whilst they may be a noob, the job of keeping the software and plugins up to date is not at all a recipe for disaster. I'm not sure if you have used Wordpress recently but everything is automated, you can even choose to have everything updated by itself so that you don't even have to do anything at all. Plus, I would actually say that Wordpress is probably a lot more "noob-friendly" than something like Hugo. 

2 hours ago, Nathan said:

Link me to Hugo, I'd like to take a look at how they markup their pages and Schema Data.

You can find it here - https://gohugo.io/. I'm not a huge fan of it really, it doesn't look good at all (pretty basic) and the lack of plugins compared to some of the ones that Wordpress has is just not great.

[Paul Hunt]

17 hours ago, Nathan said:

Link me to Hugo, I'd like to take a look at how they markup their pages and Schema Data.

Ash has given a link to the Hugo website, but here is a link to how to implement schema markup in your Hugo blog: https://code.luasoftware.com/tutorials/hugo/schema-markup-for-hugo/
Yes, Hugo can be hard to extend but once you implement those features, your website with most likely run a lot faster and will be more likely to stay online if someone shares your post and it gets popular on Reddit (Reddit hug of death).

[Nathan]

4 hours ago, Paul Hunt said:

Your website with most likely run a lot faster and will be more likely to stay online if someone shares your post and it gets popular on Reddit (Reddit hug of death).

Yes, I totally agree with you here as most probably are on a free or shared hosting environment and are not devops  

[Paul Hunt]

7 hours ago, Nathan said:

Yes, I totally agree with you here as most probably are on a free or shared hosting environment and are not devops  

What is easy to do is not always what is most efficient, as just adding plugins is easy but would probably not be as efficient as directly add it to the output stage.

Also, you would be very surprised to hear that often, people with more skills in running servers are the same people who would do pretty much anything to save a few pounds per month.

[EfficientNinja]

I think WordPress is perfect for noobs. It's a great environment to learn blogging and web development for beginners. It's popular and they'll get help almost everywhere. As for what platform is most efficient in SEO or performance, I don't think noobs should be minding those yet.

[Paul Hunt]

On 4/24/2018 at 4:12 PM, Nathan said:

Yes, I totally agree with you here as most probably are on a free or shared hosting environment and are not devops  

Looking on the internet, there does appear to be a new static site generator created for people who are not technologically minded called Publii.

Publii is a static site generator but one that uses a graphical interface, so you don't need to know any markdown unlike other SSG's.

Link to Publii: https://getpublii.com/