Moving my website from WordPress to Hugo

Original context

I originally set up a portfolio website back in 2016. At the time I was still chasing for Linux Sysadmin and as part of my studies/preparation I had been setting up LAMP/LEMP stacks, on bare metal, in VM’s, even on AWS (probably with LightSail, I can’t remember). I had some familiarity with Wordpress as a result and didn’t really look beyond it for a website solution. I wanted my own domain (so I didn’t look at WordPress.com) and I wasn’t specifically targeting cloud, so I asked around and went with an old school web hosting provider. It was actually quite a lot of work setting up the site once I got beyond the initial defaults but I liked the result well enough and I didn’t need to redo anything very often so it didn’t matter so much. As you can see by the posting dates, I don’t post that often but certainly there was always maintenance to do…

Pain Points with WordPress

Roll forward 4 or 5 years. Life and career have changed significantly. I am not a web dev, I am a cloud/platform engineer and a fan of infrastructure as code. This WordPress solution is really starting to grate:

• It isn’t cheap (about £6/month)
• I have to have half a dozen Wordpress plugins installed simply to turn off features I never wanted, like comments on posts or the adverts for Wordpress in the page footer, or to ensure that the built-in editor doesn’t change - seriously!
• Wordpress ‘developers’ love ‘Free trials’ and ‘Freemium’ versions… Every product page seems to have that same damn swing-sign popup when you scroll down and every install has a begging letter to pay for the premium version…
• There is a significant amount of maintenance involved- always there’s some new version of some plugin or PHP. In part because I post rarely, I am spending more time on maintenance, just to keep things unchanged, than anything else
• All the Wordpress maintenance has to be done within Wordpress… Yeah, clickops…
• All the virtual host maintenance has to be done manually through the hosting company’s custom WebGui. Always takes me ages to find anything… Yeah, clickops…
• I am running an unknown webserver; MySQL and PHP all on the same virtual host and I’m not a fan of any of them…
• There is essentially zero meaningful product development with the WebHost, with Wordpress, with any of it, just maintenance
• If I want to backup the site I have to do that from within wordpress and completely separately (S)FTP it out of there, Yeah, clickops… (but see below)
• SSH/FTP access to the host is really shonky. Totally non-standard, more click-ops…
• Wordpress ‘backups’, mmm… yeah…
• Whenever I want to post anything I have to format it twice, once for Wordpress and another time for Medium/ Backup
• I have to pay basically double if I want a TLS certificate and the system is gimped to prevent me setting up my own with e.g. LetsEncrypt…
• I’m aware of at least 2 occasions when my site went down without warning. One was just the five minutes that week when I was trying to show it to someone…

Beyond the above I have got the point of embarrassment. What sort of calling card is a website running on Wordpress with a clickops virtual hosting company for a platform engineer?

Moving to AWS

Earlier this year I did a take-home challenge that involved ‘setting up a modern single-page example website on AWS’. I used a public terraform module, some of my own code and some handcrafted HTML to deploy a static website on S3/CloudFront. When I next had time, I thought, I would fix up the code and get ready to deploy with Hugo. I even found a tool to extract my pages from Wordpress to Hugo MarkDown- a lot more easily than Wordpress’ own backup feature. Of course this was at the time that Hashicorp decided to break up the aws_s3_bucket resource and the module I was using was too brittle to just ‘upgrade’. I also wanted to get the www subdomain aliased to the apex and have TLS certification integrated. Anyway, got all of that fixed to a single up-to-date terraform plan on a secondary domain. Still serving a single handcrafted HTML file with an image… Still, should be great for Hugo.

Enter Hugo

Well actually I had come across Hugo years ago for an internal website at DAZN and was impressed with it but it was one thing amongst many at the time and I wasn’t much involved in setting it up. I’d just done a few posts and then moved on to another employer. The attractions were/are the static website generation and (to a much lesser extent) that it’s written in Go. The negatives were that I simply didn’t really have the time to look into it.

I now have the Hugo site up and running with some kind assistance from Reddit friends to incorporate the theme customisations I wanted. The advantages are essentially all the opposites of what I didn’t like about WordPress:

• It’s cheap (about £1/month, including TLS certification)
• I can choose a simple theme and don’t have to worry about turning off features I don’t want.
• There isn’t an obligatory marketplace for Wordpress themes or plugins with a freemium model
• There is no server to maintain, so no maintenance and no fear of being compromised because of some PHP vulnerability
• Hugo website build and deployment is all in code, which can all be in source control (so fully backed up) and can all be automated
• Anything I would want to do on the hosting platform (AWS) is sensible, professional-grade stuff. It’s not just familiar but there’s popular tooling support too.
• I can post in MarkDown which is what I prefer to write in in the first place
• Because the site is served from CloudFront, it’s ‘unlikely’ to go down

Additionally it’s a good calling card for what I do in the day job.

Is This For Everyone?

Would this solution be for everyone? No. I can’t see this implementation selling to a naive user who ‘just wants a website’. Plenty enough businesses have weak websites that they don’t update the content for, or even no dedicated website, and wind up using Facebook instead. Wordpress of course have a first-party hosted offering. There are plenty of other website platforms and as I said earlier, I am not a web dev. I hadn’t come across ‘Jamstack’ before setting up Hugo here. It seems like a web-specific expression of good architectural domain boundaries but it’s perfectly adequate here. I initially thought that the Hugo part of this implementation would IMO be straightforward enough for someone who would consider a third-party hosted Wordpress solution but trying to move beyond the raw theme to integrate e.g. site search and custom icons certainly requires a great deal more understanding of templating and CSS than WordPress! It’s hard to argue with free and Hugo on GitHub pages would be adequate. There are other static hosting solutions recommended by the Hugo project also.

Hugo on AWS/S3/ACM solution is good for me because I:

• Work with AWS; Terraform; GitHub daily
• Want a solution that leverages these
• Want a deliverable that shows use of these technologies that people can see and examine together with the code that built it

Hugo would also be a good base for an internal/documentation/blog website in a technical org, just as when I first encountered it. The build and deploy model is an excellent match for organisations with automated code approval and deployment, e.g. CI/CD.

Subsequent Iteration (I)

Since I wanted something that people could look at I decided to move the heavy lifting for the infra into a terraform module that I could publish on the community module registry. Although I am including an example, of course the ‘proof’ for this would be to deploy my own website using it - which I have now done. Of course this would be exactly as AWS introduced Origin Access Control and deprecated Origin Access Identity, and at the time of writing this feature is not yet available in Terraform, although there is already a pull request to add this functionality. Expect an update to this module soon!

Subsequent Iteration (II, 2nd September 2022)

Early this morning (UK time) Hashicorp released version 4.29.0 of the Terraform AWS provider, including support for Cloudfront Origin Access Control. I’m very pleased to say that the latest version of my public terraform module now incorporates this and that this website is deployed using it