April 9, 2026
Static shock or blog bliss?
Moving from WordPress to Jekyll (and static site generators in general)
WordPress dumped for Jekyll: fans cheer speed, skeptics cry “overcomplicated”
TLDR: A fast-moving team ditched WordPress for Jekyll, using an AI coding helper to migrate and prune years of posts for speed and control. Comments split between cheering static sites for speed/security and blasting the setup as overcomplicated or unfriendly to non-tech writers—spotlighting a bigger trend toward simpler, safer sites.
WordPress just got dumped for static site life, and the comments showed up like it’s reality TV. The team moved their blog from WordPress to Jekyll for speed, control, and fewer headaches, leaning on Claude Code (an AI coding helper) to sift 15 years of posts, prune the junk, and rebuild 288 pages in plain text. They used Google Search Console data to keep winners and trash the rest, fueling jokes about “delete‑to‑win” SEO.
Cue the drama. One camp is yelling “So fast, and secure!”, thrilled to ditch constant updates to databases and plugins. Another camp isn’t buying it: “so much more complicated and limiting,” calling the new setup a dev maze regular writers won’t touch. One veteran drops a cautionary tale: Jekyll → Hugo → Astro → roll‑your‑own, because fiddly builds were “unthinkable my wife would ever touch.”
Plot twist: Cloudflare teased a WordPress “successor” on Astro, but this team chose older, steadier Jekyll they already knew. Nerd corner asks, why not just Makefile + Pandoc? Top memes of the day: “brain drain but make it WordPress,” “delete half your blog and call it optimization,” and AI intern Claude doing the graveyard shift.
Key Points
- •The company migrated its site from WordPress to Jekyll to improve speed and reduce dependency on WordPress developers.
- •Cloudflare announced a new Astro-based CMS positioned as a “spiritual successor” to WordPress, but the team chose Jekyll for its maturity and familiarity.
- •Static site generators like Jekyll avoid databases and app servers, relying on templates, configs, and markdown with YAML frontmatter.
- •The team pruned legacy content using DemandSphere’s GSC tools and indexing data, exporting posts via WordPress XML.
- •Claude Code was used extensively to analyze content equity and assist development, including handling image migration details.