Why Pixaful moved from Hugo to WordPress

Most of the posts you find online are about moving from WordPress to Hugo and whilst most of them are valid, we have gone the opposite way.

Hugo is an amazing product that builds static websites that load very quickly. You can create any kind of website that you want and manage it with a headless CMS like forestry.

We originally built pixaful using Hugo, and the learning experience was great. We can now use that knowledge to build static websites in Hugo for clients.

Why did we switch to WordPress?

We want to focus our skills on one CMS and be very good at it. We love WordPress and can bend it to our will without the need for page builders.

We wanted better form management, we didn’t want to hand-code forms and host them on Amazon to get around the monthly fees that static host form vendors were charging.

We also realised that at some point we would be using e-commerce on the site. Believe it or not, it is possible to run an e-commerce static site, but we have no plans to learn how to do that when there are better systems already out there. It would not be a good use of our time.

There are some things we love about Hugo which we carried over to WordPress.

• Markdown – We prefer this over any CMS text editor. It is easy to learn and ensures the output is pure. Some editors add extra breaks and spans, Markdown ensures that this does not happen.
• Custom fields – This is possible with some content management systems. Craft CMS has this feature out of the box and is something we cannot live without. WordPress requires a plugin called Advanced Custom Fields. The plugin is a developers dream and should be used whenever you build a new WordPress website.

The rest of the stuff, we believe WordPress does better.

• SEO – You can do your SEO with Hugo but managing it is hard unless you use extra software to ensure your site is 100% SEO friendly. We use SEOPress for our SEO because it does not leave a footprint and is very light. Better than Yoast we think!
• Plugins – Hugo does not have plugins, so when building your site you need to think about the future of your business. You need to think about plugin quality though, less is usually more!
• Scheduled Posts – WordPress is a CMS designed for blogging that has grown over time into a CMS that can handle anything. You cannot schedule posts in Hugo. We needed this functionality.
• Social Autoposting – When we post we want to ensure our message gets out there quickly without too much effort. We achieved this with WordPress but this would need to be done using extra paid for services with Hugo.

Hugo is a fantastic static site generator that can build any website, but it has its limitations. It can be an extremely useful tool for building websites that do not change much and need little maintenance and require fast loading times.

Hugo is a fantastic static site generator that can build any website, but it has its limitations. It can be an extremely useful tool for building websites that do not change much and need little maintenance and require fast loading times.

We shaved a second off our loading time with WordPress, which to use does not make sense as we only had one CSS file and one javascript file!

We have a few extra calls on our WP install but can live with that for the extra convenience that WordPress is giving us.

We have not given up on Hugo and will continue to work with it and hope we can do more with it in the future.