Advantages of Wordpress over Hugo

May 25, 2020 wordpress hugo [blogging]

Today let us talk about Hugo vs Wordpress. If you search the web you see many bloggers espousing Hugo. I disagree with this. Of course the technical people are going to blog about Hugo. They don’t have much else to write about. Except their technical superiority. In the meantime notable names like BBC America, Sony Music, TechCrunch, and Disney quietly run their sites on Wordpress. They don’t write posts to submit to Hacker News bragging about their static blogging setup. They simply get to work and do great things.

As someone who’s posted with both Wordpress and Hugo, I’ll tell you right now Wordpress is better. Let me tell you why.

Easy To Start : How easy is it to start with Wordpress? Go to Wordpress.com and click on the giant ‘Get Started’ button. How easy is it to start with Hugo? Well, first you download the executable. Then you set up your hosting, then you… lol. You can push out 10 posts on Wordpress By the time a Hugoista can even figure out how to write “Hello World : This is Hugo.”

A Good Editor : Wordpress gives you an excellent editor with all the formatting options along the top, with a preview option, and with an option to edit the raw HTML just out of the box. It is, simply, the entire centerpiece. With Hugo you have to drag out your own text editor and figure out markdown and not just any markdown but the special markdown used by Hugo. By the way Wordpress supports markdown out of the box, you know in addition to regular writing.

Spellcheck : The most annoying thing about Hugo is spellcheck. This is built into Wordpress. Just like that.

Backups : Wordpress has backups built in. You can even revert to a previous version of a post with a simple menu. How do you backup and revert with Hugo? Many Hugo fans use git. Trust me, you don’t want to go git commit and git push every time you make a few changes to your post. And if you mess up then you’ll be going back through git logs. Blogging should be about sitting down and writing, not going back through git logs to look for that one version that had the perfect sentence structure. If you bothered to save it.

Uncomplicated Posting : How do you post in Wordpress? Simple - click the Post button. How do you post in Hugo? Well, first run the Python script to run Hugo. Then upload the files to S3. Then go to the site and remember you have caching enabled. So now you log into AWS and go to CloudFront to invalidate the cache. And. So. On. I mean, come on, you can’t just get down to blogging and get it over with. Oh yeah and don’t forget to commit and push your changes to your git repo. In case your computer crashes.

Reasonably Priced : How much is Wordpress? It is free. Just go to Wordpress.com and sign up. You get some storage, get featured on other blogs, and a snazzy username all for nothing. Like free as in beer. How much is Hugo? Hugo is in free as in speech. This means you pay for everything. Oh I forgot, Wordpress is also free as in speech. You don’t like Wordpress.com? Just pack up and move to another host or even host it yourself.

Edit From Anywhere : From where can you post to Wordpress? From anywhere. There is a nice website. Native apps for iOS and Android. There are even desktop apps for Windows and MacOS. From where can you post with Hugo? Not from iOS or Android. Not from your iPad out in the remote jungle. Unless you like paying for another computer you can remotely log into to run Hugo. You know, because Hugo doesn’t run on iOS. Or Android. That is free as in speech for you.

Honestly I don’t even know why I bother. Oh yeah it is to flog my M1 Finance referral. Please consider signing up for M1 Finance with my referral link. I’ll get $10 and you’ll also get $10. Although the minimum investment to start is $25. I don’t know how that works.