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Comment by albatrosstrophy | Hacker News Reader

I host a hobby website and use WordPress for everything. Even as an entry level user, I agree the amount of plugins are ridiculous.

But it's free and I only pay for hosting. Anyone knows what are the alternatives for someone like me?

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I've been looking at replacing my project's website with Hugo (https://gohugo.io). Rather than generating a web page dynamically every time someone comes to your site, you generate the entire website statically whenever you change something. That means hosting can be entirely a "dumb" web server (or a "dumb" web server + apis which feed info to javascript, if you really need it). It also means:

* you can keep everything in version control to roll things back

* content can be fed to it programmatically

* project members can send pull request to post content, rather than requiring a special account

I've only gone through some examples from a book so far, but it looks pretty powerful, and is has good recommendations from others in the community.

I don't (yet) have a personal web presence, but if I do, it will definitely be something like Hugo.

There's also a plugin for Wordpress (SimplyStatic, I believe) that creates a static copy of your site. I use it in conjuction with bitbucket and netlify, and it works quite well.

And the dumb web server can be Firebase Hosting, Netlify, Vercel, CloudFlare Pages, with extremely generous free tiers and practically zero maintenance.

Recently, I’ve come to appreciate Kirby (https://getkirby.com/). It’s commercial but reasonably priced. Clean, powerful and relaxed with updates.

As someone with probably 30+ sites built with Kirby I’d agree that it’s better than WP in many ways but it’s very developers oriented and it’s not really a replacement for WP for the average user.

And when I say developers oriented I mean it in a good way.

Entirely agree with that assessment. All my clients love the Kirby backend and as a developer it’s a pleasure to work with the system.

Documentation for first-time users could be better though. The YAML page structure took some time to wrap my head around. Also, as it’s flat-file, backups are trivial – just copy the folder or commit everything to a VCS.

I can second that. Customers really love the very simple and clean UI and I love the Developer experience :-)

But yes it would not be a replacement for WordPress if you want to click together a site with themes and plugins

Publii is an alternative to publish a simple blog for free without paying for hosting from your own computer. It's much, much more simple and limited than WordPress, but this is its strength for some people.

Last time I looked, Hugo + GitHub + Netlify is free and fast, within fairly generous limits.

Hugo is great… once you work out how it works.

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