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Comment by Clorith | Hacker News Reader

I'll bite. What makes WordPress too heavy in your regard (I'm a huge fan of WordPress my self, so quite biased), is it the way you use it, or the themes you use?

At it's base, WordPress is quite simple, and it's the themes that define what it looks like and feels like to your users. If you are looking for something very simple then there's the simple twenty twelve theme which is very clean. The theme directory on wordpress.org is also full of themes, there's even a plugin that transforms your WordPress into "Ghost" (The same feel and layout).

But I would love to hear back on my original question as well regarding it being heavy.

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For me, there is a lot of work setting it up, getting the themes where you want them, then finding one of 100 various plug-in's for SEO or twitter or whatever, and figuring out which is the best, and which has the least security holes.

You are right, at the core, it is simple, but it is time consuming to me. And it falls over under load unless you have a bit of time or money to throw at it, or both.

I like the idea or working in a text editor of my liking, knowing that quote marked in code aren't auto converted to smart quotes, knowing that the raw markdown is raw, and I can move it anywhere.

I am sure you can do all this in Wordpress, I am just looking to remove all that overheard, as starting a blog again is feeling more daunting than ever given my current medical issues. If I can just get it off the ground I will be happy.

But I feel I have to do something, so I want to do something that gets me to my end goal as quick as possible, but allows things to possibly grow without me thinking about what a Varnish, CDN, Cloudfront, etc all are.

WordPress does not fall over under load, poorly configured Apache servers do that. When WP sites fall over in heavy traffic it's because they're on a small VPS or shared host, and Apache was allowed to spawn more processes than there is available memory. They only run into this condition when there's enough traffic that the baseline number of worker processes all get used up and new ones are spawned. It doesn't matter what's running on the server. I have done no special configuration and use no caching whatsoever, and my WordPress blog has been on HN's front page with hundreds of concurrent visits several times.

Eh, Apache is a common culprit, but it is not the only one. WordPress sites with a moderately complicated theme and several plugins can easily crumble under load even with an nginx+PHP-FPM setup. Yes, you can throw more hardware power at it, but that's true with Apache as well. If you're expecting a lot of visitors to a WordPress site, you will generally want to make sure you have a good cache.

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