Moved my blog from Wordpress to Serverless

08/09/2021

I published my first blog in mid-2018 and since then this is my 4th revamp.

I used to host my blog, a WordPress instance in Digital Ocean, then moved the entire setup (thanks to plugins like Duplicator) to AWS LightSail. And now it is completely serverless.

Clearly, I get bored with things pretty fast and when you have a blog, there is always someplace for improvement be it performance or the look and feel.

A lot goes behind the scene.

The very first reason I switched to a serverless architecture was performance.

For a long period of time, my blog was lagging on several performance parameters.

• Sometimes I needed to optimize all the images
• The SSL certificate expired and my traffic bounced off.
• The themes I chose were not looking best for a coding blog
• Caching issue of styles and JS scripts.
• Syncing issue in cloud distribution.

And a ton more I have to take care of every now and then.

I couldn't focus on the main thing, WRITING. Because I was not satisfied with the site itself.

Fortunately, I came across an article about static site hosting from AWS.

Then I found out a few sites that were running serverless and man, these sites were fast, like blazing fast!

Well quite obvious, because these static sites are pre-rendered. Do not require back and forth DB calls. Cutting down all the server-side requests.

Quite impressive.

The next chain of thought in my brain went on like this:

• Do I really need a dynamic site?
• What dynamic features do I use?
• Well, there is comments, subscriber list and the WordPress backend and all the plugins and the power to customize.

But the static site gives me:

• Pre-rendered static pages
• Good performance
• No worries to manage plugins and cache
• No SSL maintenance worry (Because AWS will take care of it)
• One time configuration
• And markdown support! Who needs the WP editor anymore?

I was already on AWS and here is the best part, all I had to deal with was s3 and CloudFront, maybe a bit of lambda function (I didn't stop there though! Will tell that story next time).

Will tell you about the serverless stack in my future post.

Serverless architecture is not truly serverless. It's a concept of moving out of the traditional DB dependency to the static world of things.

And for a blog, I don't see it as a downgrading.

Of course, it has some Pros and Cons. But, now when I look at my blog, it's a relief.

Focusing on writing better content :) which is all about coding.