This website has been running on WordPress since I first set it up in 2013 — hosted on a shared cPanel server at Arvixe (and then Domain Racer). It has served me well, but over time the maintenance overhead started to feel disproportionate to what I actually needed: a simple personal site with a blog, a CV, a music section, and not much else. WordPress is a powerful platform, but for a use case like mine it brings a lot of complexity along with it — a database, PHP, plugins to keep updated, and a web-based admin interface that I rarely enjoyed using.

I decided to migrate to Hugo, a static site generator written in Go. The new setup is much simpler: all content lives in Markdown files in a Git repository, and the site is deployed automatically to GitHub Pages via GitHub Actions whenever I push a change. No database, no server-side runtime, no plugins — just files.

Why Hugo? It is fast, flexible, and has a clean templating system. It also handles structured data well, which I used for the experience timeline on this site — the full career history lives in a YAML file and is rendered by a custom shortcode rather than being hardcoded into a page.

The migration was largely carried out with the help of Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding assistant, which got the whole thing up and running in no time. It wrote a custom Python script to parse the WordPress XML export, download all media attachments (images, PDFs, presentations), and embed them in the right places across 72 blog posts. Content was converted from HTML to Markdown, the custom theme was written from scratch in plain CSS, and structured pages (Experience, Publications, Music) were rebuilt as proper Hugo content rather than improvised WordPress pages.

Deployment is handled entirely by GitHub Actions: a push to main triggers a Hugo build and deploys the output to GitHub Pages. The custom domain is configured via a CNAME file in the repository, and HTTPS is provided automatically by GitHub via Let’s Encrypt — interestingly the same tool I wrote about back in 2016.

The result is a site that is faster to load, easier to maintain, free to host, and version-controlled in its entirety. Editing a post is now just opening a Markdown file.