Migrate from Wordpress to Hugo

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Yesterday and today I migrated my web site / blog from Wordpress to Hugo. It was less effort and pain than I had anticipated.

It was done with these steps:

  • Install Hugo (I am running on macOS using macPorts, so: sudo port install hugo)
  • In my wordpress installation, I aded the “Wordpress to Jekyll Exporter” plugin and exported the blog posts to a local zip file.
  • After unzipping this file I ran hugo import jekyll jekyll-export hugo-sothawo to create the initial Hugo setup for my site
  • Added this as git repository to a git repository hosted at my web hoster
  • Cloned the Mainroad theme from GitHub and pushed my clone to a private git repo as well, as I have some adjustments to the theme.
  • Adjusted the theme and its settings until I had it to my liking.
  • Went through my pages and posts to clean up links that had the full path to my site in them (they will when deployed with Hugo, but that should not be in the code). Adapted the code snippets to the highlighting that Hugo uses. This was some time consuming stupid work.
  • Created the deployment of my site with hugo
  • Uploaded the public directory to my Hoster into a new directory servde from a test subdomain.
  • Checked that all works.
  • Changed the DNS settings to point to the new site.

And here we go. No more PHP version updates, Wordpress or plugin security updates, database and file backups.

And I am running a much cleaner solution now:

  • no more cookies
  • no external fonts or things downloaded from other servers

Edits:

21.05.2023: Changed info where I host my git repos.