I Finally Stopped Using WordPress

Not because WordPress is bad. Or because there’s something better out there. Not at all.

A little while ago I rebuilt my personal website and a few personal projects, even if it was just for fun.

This rebuild got me thinking about budget, because hosting is only cheap with the initial discount. When it came time to renew, it turned out you pay the regular price—and that’s actually pretty steep.

Luckily, around that time I’d been messing around with TailwindCSS, all thanks to Pak Sandika Galih’s tutorial on YouTube. And honestly, I had no idea there were platforms called Netlify and Vercel.

For those who don’t know, Netlify and Vercel are cloud platforms for hosting modern web apps—Jamstack (JavaScript, APIs, and Markup). Basically, if you build a web app, or even just a simple HTML site, you upload it here and it’s instantly live.

Seriously, instantly live, man. I was stunned, since I hadn’t kept up with the web dev world in ages.

From there, it finally hit me: “I could actually save on hosting costs with this.”

The GitHub + Vercel/Netlify Combo

This combo of GitHub and Vercel/Netlify is what finally let me cut down on hosting costs. Because all you have to do is push your code to GitHub.

Connect GitHub to Vercel or Netlify, and boom—your website is live. Then you just set up the domain. Done.

Got a change? Just update the code, push it to GitHub again, and Vercel/Netlify will automatically deploy the changes.

For my tech stack, I’m now using SvelteKit, and I also use AstroJS for some things. In my opinion, coding with both is simple, no fuss, and of course friendly when it comes to setting up SEO.

The Downside

The one small downside, at first, was that it wasn’t super convenient—if I wanted to post a blog, I had to open VSCode just for a single post.

But I eventually found a solution: it turns out you can set up your own CMS. Sure, it’s not as good as WordPress’s text editor, but it’s more than enough.

Other Reasons

A few other reasons—honestly, I just don’t use WordPress anymore, because sometimes for a simple blog it feels like overkill.

It has way too many features that often go unused, while the code and files just keep piling up, especially the plugins.

Well, that’s about it. I’m not saying you should do the same thing, okay. But if you want to learn to code too, go for it—it can save you a few hundred thousand rupiah in hosting costs.