, 2 min read

Considerations when converting from WordPress.com to Hugo

At times WordPress.com uses its user base to experiment with some half baked new features, see for example Classical editor in WordPress.com, or see this Hello Jekyll, bye Wordpress.com! These are the times when I consider migrating from WordPress.com to another blogging platform. Usually after some grumbling I stick with WordPress.com, simply because it is very good. WordPress.com is working very reliably, offering a multitude of features not found elsewhere.

Hugo is probably the best choice regarding static website generators. Hugo's strongest point is its speed, see 6 Static Blog Generators That Aren’t Jekyll. As this blog has more than 200 posts, and my other blog at Collected Links (dead link) has almost 3.000 posts, speed is of concern. For a list of more static website generators see Top Open-Source Static Site Generators.

Below is a list of tasks and open issues when migrating from WordPress.com to Hugo static website generator:

  1. Migration itself: as of today there does not seem to be an out-of-the box WordPress.com migration toolkit. Ideally one takes the XML export file to start Hugo. I have written such a program and described it here: Converting WordPress Export File to Hugo.
  2. Automatic showing "Related to" blog posts
  3. Scheduled tasks: Using some crontab or at-job machinery will probably do the trick
  4. site stats: As the WordPress.com stats are no longer available one has to either use Google analytics, or analyze the weblog of the web-server. Right now I find the WordPress.com statistics page quite informative and I prefer it to the convoluted statistics page found on Google Analytics.
  5. top posts, blog stats directly on the blog
  6. Android app for publishing posts when you don't want to turn on your laptop or desktop machine
  7. publicize, i.e., automatically sharing new posts on Google+, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.
  8. posting posts by e-mail
  9. password protected posts do not seem to work out of the box
  10. reblogged posts no longer work

Below list of features are already built-in in Hugo, and there is no need to work around it:

  1. math equations
  2. the "more"-tag seems to be there, it is called summaries

Added 11-Jun-2017: Julia Evans also uses Hugo. She migrated from Jekyll to Hugo. Her Hugo blog source is in GitHub.

Added 18-Jan-2018: This post is referenced in Awesome Hugo.