Why I switched this site to Jekyll

For six years, I used WordPress to maintain this site. I hosted the whole setup with the good folks at Site5. All in all, it was a fairly standard blog setup.

Last week, I switched to a Jekyll-powered site hosted on GitHub Pages. Here’s why:

1. Jekyll is simple. This isn’t a complex web site. It has a few hundred posts, plus a few other ancillary pages. None of the pages require dynamic content, generated on the fly. In short, this is the perfect sort of site for Jekyll, which generates static HTML pages using simple templates.
2. It’s a fun challenge. Learning to use the tools that underpin Jekyll—Markdown, Liquid, and Git—has been an interesting challenge.
3. GitHub is free. Maintaining my web hosting account at Site5 cost me about $70 per year. GitHub is free, and runs Jekyll natively.
4. GitHub is secure. My WordPress site was compromised at least twice, and was subject to regular brute-force password attacks. That led me to install an increasingly complex set of security plugins—all to protect a site I maintain as a hobby. GitHub has a security system far more robust than anything I could hope to maintain on my own.

Smashing Magazine published an article earlier this month explaining static website generation, with a follow-up reviewing four popular ones.