Back in the day, I moved my website to a self-hosted Wordpress CMS to get some experience with running and maintaining such an environment. Now that I only host my own websites anymore, running a full CMS made no sense - especially given the constant (automated) attempts at breaking into the site.
As of today, I only host statically generated websites, built using Jekyll. This makes maintenance a lot easier and removes most of the security threats.
I exported my website using the Wordpress to Jekyll Exporter plugin (developed on Github), then reviewed and updated all the blog posts.
There was a lot of cruft in the form of image thumbnails dating back to the days that the site ran Serendipity CMS - it took a lot of time to clean up and replace embedded video links with updated links.
Jekyll themes
I use the minimal-mistakes theme.
Jekyll plugins
-
jekyll-feed
The jekyll-feed plugin creates an Atom/RSS feed for your site at /feed.xml
-
jekyll-target-blank
By default, hyperlinks do not open in a new tab/browser. The jekyll-target-blank plugin (Github link) for Jekyll fixes this.
-
jekyll-titles-from-headings
The jekyll-titles-from-headings plugin pulls the page title from the first Markdown heading when none is specified. This should not be needed if you always specify titles. I used this mostly while testing during the Wordpress migration.