Why I migrate from Wordpress to Jekyll

This post is my first one I publish on Jekyll. Recently, I made the choice to upgrade from Wordpress to Jekyll. Below, I list the advantages and disadvantages about replacing Wordpress by Jekyll:

The pros

Constantly we need to update Wordpress

Security issues in Wordpress

Host your Jekyll on GitHub for free with your own domain name

You can use a versoning software to track your modications in Jekyll

Use markdown for Jekyll instead of a WYSIWYG editor

The cons

Jekyll is not user friendly for people who do not know git or Markdown

Dynamic part in Jekyll is very limited

Number of Jekyll themes are very limited

The main reason pushes me to use Jekyll is that Wordpress is hard to maintain (security, plugins, etc.). My Wordpress was also hosted on my own server that was also painful to configure (SSH, database, FTP, etc.). So, I wanted something easy and Jekyll was the perfect solution.

Indeed, Jekyll is a blogging framework who generates static website. We use Jekyll through a package manager, this means it is straightforward to keep Jekyll up to date. And, the fact that Jekyll generates static website, we have less security issue. Moreover, you can host your Jekyll blog on GitHub pages. With Jekyll, you can really focus on your contents instead of losing your time in configuration and maintenance.

How to move from Wordpress to Jekyll

Install and run Jekyll

If RubyGems is already installed on your machine, you only need four commands to launch Jekyll from scratch:

gem install jekyll

jekyll new my-blog-name

cd my-blog-name

jekyll serve







Personalize your Jekyll

You can easily customize your Jekyll by modifying _config.yml and HTML & CSS files. But if you are not a web designer, you can also find a theme on the Internet. Unfortunately, the number of Jekyll themes is very poor compared to the Wordpress ones.

My Jekyll blog is hosted on GitHub and if you want to do the same, you can set up a custom domain with GitHub Pages.

Put your comment system on Disqus

On Wordpress, I have already used Disqus as comment system. So, it was very easy to migrate the comments. The only thing you need to be careful is that your Jekyll permalink matches your Wordpress one. You have also other ways to migrate your comments and do not keep your permalink. But, I will not detail here.

For someone who did not use Disqus before, you can also import your Wordpress comments into Disqus system. And after that, you can migrate to Jekyll very easily.

Import your content from Wordpress

There is a very nice Wordpress plugin named Jekyll Exporter that can convert your Wordpress to Jekyll compatible files (configuration file, posts in Markdown and images).

Two important things you need to know about Jekyll Exporter:

Jekyll Exporter will not convert everything to Markdown. When it cannot convert, the HTML tag will remain.

You will probably have some issue with images. You can either update the image location in your posts or either put Jekyll image's location as same as the Wordpress one.

Jekyll workflow

If you use Jekyll with GitHub pages, your workflow to write and publish will be very short:

vim _posts/new-post-subject.md







git add _posts/new-post-subject.md

git commit -m "Commit message"







Conclusion

Jekyll is the perfect fit for someone who know git workflow and Markdown. You do not need to be a master of Markdown, but at least, you are not afraid to use a markup language such as HTML, XML, latex, etc. Markdown is just another markup language but it is a lightweight one.

You want to see the result? This blog runs on Jekyll and the code source is at this location.