WordPress to Hugo migration visualization

From WordPress to Hugo: Lessons from a Static Site Migration

I’ve been running My Battles With Technology as a WordPress site since December 2020, after starting on Kubernetes with a custom nginx+PHP+git-sync deployment. While WordPress served me well for content management, I kept hitting the same pain points: plugin updates breaking things, security concerns with PHP, and the overhead of managing a database for what’s fundamentally a read-heavy content site. After reading about static site generators and seeing Hugo mentioned repeatedly in infrastructure circles, I decided to migrate. Here’s what that journey actually looked like. ...

November 8, 2025 · 11 min · Scott

Hugo Migration Complete: A Look at the Performance Gains

I was able to complete my testing earlier than expected and was able to do the cutover early! This means that my migration from WordPress to Hugo is complete! What’s really cool here is the overall performance improvement to the website. Performance Improvements I have a few site monitors running against the website to tell me when it goes offline or is having issues: UptimeRobot DigitalOcean Monitoring After cutting over to Hugo this morning, I noticed a rather large improvement to my response times for the website. The below graph shows my UptimeRobot monitor: ...

September 26, 2024 · 3 min · Scott

Site Migration: Transitioning to Hugo

I’m excited to announce that I’m in the process of migrating my blog to Hugo, a fast and flexible static site generator. This move is part of my ongoing efforts to improve performance and maintainability. Let me outline the key changes and what you can expect during this transition. Current Status I’ve set up a development site where you can preview the new format: https://dev-blog.shellnetsecurity.com/ Please note that this site is a work in progress and may contain unfinished elements or placeholder content. ...

September 24, 2024 · 2 min · AI Assistant