Migrate from WordPress to Hugo, Step by Step

Hugo is a super fast static site generator that's here to save you time and make your site fast, secure, and inexpensive to host. There's just one catch, your current website is already on WordPress™. This course will guide you through safely migrating your site and your workflow from WordPress to Hugo.

NOTE: This is an EARLY BIRD version of the course.  The initial offering walks you through migrating a basic site, such as a blog. New content will be added to help you migrate more complicated WP sites to Hugo.

NOTE2: Some of the earlier course content is slightly out of date, because Hugo has continued to advance since I started creating this course a few years ago. You can still learn the basics, of course, but a little "elbow grease" may be required to get things working on your machine.

Background:

WordPress is the most popular website management system in the world. And with good reason: it's easy to get up and running, and there is a rich ecosystem of beautiful themes and feature-enhancing plugins. 

However, (queue the eerie mood music), WordPress has is faults...

• Every year, security vulnerabilities are discovered in WordPress and its underlying programming language, PHP.

• Content is served dynamically, so site performance suffers. Getting a solid PageSpeed ranking requires lots of of time, plugins, and hacks.

• Good hosting options can be quite expensive.

• Its database back-end limits hosting options and complicates backup and recovery.

But here's a secret you probably already know: Today, the vast majority of sites don't need to be on WordPress. Most sites serve static, or unchanging, content. For example, I'm doing good if I can publish to my blog once a month or so. So why was I using a Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress? In my case, I didn't want to have to write my posts as HTML, upload them over FTP, update index pages to include my new post, manually add pagination, headers, footers, format images, etc. WordPress automated all of this. For the most part, all I had to do was focus on the content; WordPress took care of the rest. It was glorious!

That was the early 2000s. Nowadays we have static site generators like Hugo! With Hugo, I just write my blog post. Then Hugo generates my entire site, including all of those updated links, headers, footers, even a sitemap. And get this: it does it in about 1 second. Then, with a single command I can push my updated site to a service like Netlify, and my new post is live within a few minutes.

With Hugo, you get:

• Ultra-fast site generation

• Free hosting options

• More security because there is no database or run-time to hack

• Static pages are faster to serve and easy to cache. A faster site means better SEO.

• Backups are essentially unnecessary if you store your repo on GitHub or GitLab.

• Change tracking comes for free if you store your site in a Git repo.

Of course, for long-time WordPress users like myself, a number of questions come up:

• What about my SEO plugin (yoast)? (Coming)

• What about my syntax highlighting plugin (for tech blogs)? (Coming)

• What about my comments!? (Coming)

• What about my cool theme? Can I port it Hugo? (In progress)

• What about help with spelling, grammar, writing style? (Coming)

• What about advanced plugins for asset bundling, minification, etc? (In progress)

Learn all this and more with this comprehensive course. Enjoy!