entrepreneurs & websites: make an informed choice.

What WordPress does

You want to stand out from other websites. You want to be noticed. You want people to hang around on your site for a while. You want to be cool. With a basic WordPress website you quickly end up in the ‘add it to the pile’ collection. A plugin here, some PHP there and a bit of custom CSS as the cherry on top, and your browser is struggling. All your plugins have their own scripts that all need to load, and sometimes you only use a few lines of code from an entire plugin. All of this slows your site down for no reason, and that scares off visitors and our big friend Google.

Custom Code

I can hear you thinking: “but what should I do then?” The answer is simple: learn HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Or hire someone who knows their stuff. In a simple code editor, you untie the rope from my feet. I’m free again, and like in “The Matrix” I can bang out pages in no time. Want a special layout? Cool. Want to go all out with animations? Let’s go. With custom code, the possibilities in the browser are practically endless. And the site is as light and as fast as it can be.

Don’t get me wrong. A well-informed choice for WordPress is perfectly fine. If you want your own page builder, want to integrate other platforms or have an incredibly large website, WordPress is probably a slightly more manageable solution. But if you’re a startup picking WordPress because it’s easy, consider investing in code.

Enter Jekyll

Coding sites in just HTML, CSS & JS has a downside too: it’s not that easy to edit if you don’t know what you’re doing. Plus, want to change something small in the footer? Then you get to do it by hand on every single page. Luckily there’s a solution for that as well. Let me introduce you to one of my new best friends: Jekyll. Jekyll is a static site generator. What’s that? It’s a system that does exactly what I want. In my code editor I throw together all the building blocks of my site, then I tell Jekyll what goes where and Jekyll stitches the whole lot together. Change something small in the footer? I edit it in the building block and now it’s exactly how I want it, everywhere. Thanks, Jekyll.

It gets even better: I can tell Jekyll which content I want to be editable. That way I can deliver a site that a client can fully edit and fill in, without the site breaking. Chill, man.

It gets better still. Because Jekyll is a static site generator, there’s no way for security breaches to get in. It’s plain & simple: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. If you try to hack that, you’re just wrecking your own computer. It’s a feeling of safety and calm that falls over me like a warm blanket. With WordPress I always had to keep everything up to date as fast as possible to avoid a security breach, and on top of that, an update could break something in my site out of the blue.

Finally, I work straight in GitHub from my code editor. GitHub is a platform for version control. That means every version of my site is available online for me at any moment. Site broke? Made a change that wasn’t so cool? Whole site vanished for some reason? No problem.

So it’s a no-brainer: ditch WordPress and come play with Jekyll.