WordPress to Hugo Migration
This is the first time in decades I haven’t had a WordPress instance live. Lordamercy…
WP Trucker Logs: From Shared Hosting to Code-First
Over two decades, swantron.com hopped through several hosting trends:
- Phase 1: Classic – Traditional shared hosting (Siteground)
- Phase 2: Cloud Ops – VMs & DBs (EC2 & RDS / GAE & not RDS)
- Phase 3: IaC-adjacent – Dockerized one-click pets (GCP, but mostly DigitalOcean)
- Phase 4: The End State – Static delivery via Hugo + GitHub Actions
Each previous phase was just a different way of babysitting a server. This migration is different. It’s not just a new host; it’s a fundamental change in philosophy from ‘managed system’ to code-first delivery.
The Database Horror (The Lordamercy)
I had a shower thought about how gross a WordPress database might end up after being left out in the rain for 20 years (2005-2025). I finally checked. My final database dump: 34MB and 555,947 lines of text.
- 122,307 references to
bouncerblog.com—a domain that died over a decade ago. - Serialized PHP arrays stored as strings. Want to change a simple rewrite rule? Nope. Good luck parsing a 2,000-character string in
wp_options. - Zombie Data: Thousands of
_transiententries and orphaned plugin settings that WordPress autoloads on every single page request, long after the plugins are deleted.
The database had become a dumpster fire. Transitioning to Markdown files is nice. No more regex-searching a SQL dump just to find a setting.
The Migration (The 1,040 Post-Slugs)
Moving 1,040 posts is a special kind of hell. The goal was to strip away the ugly legacy /index.php/ prefix from my URLs without breaking 20 years of external links and search indexing.
I wrote some dirty Python to automate the alias field in Hugo’s spec to map the shitty legacy paths to the new clean ones.
The result in each Markdown file:
title: "This Old Post about Hot Sauce"
slug: "this-old-post-about-hot-sauce"
aliases:
- /index.php/2005/10/10/this-old-post-about-hot-sauce/
Super straightforward. Hugo generates redirect HTML pages at the old paths during the build. This preserves every bookmark (yeah right), share, and search result while allowing the site to live at a modern URL.
Result: 1,041/1,041 posts migrated with 100% link integrity.
The New Stack
Hugo 0.154.5 for static generation, GitHub Pages + Actions for hosting and CI/CD. No themes—just custom CSS and layout code that I control entirely. No comments, because I’m not collecting feedback from blog commentators.
The Tipping Point
| Feature | WordPress | Hugo |
|---|---|---|
| Speed | 2s - 4s Load | < 500ms |
| Security | Constant Patches | Zero Attack Surface |
| Cost | Monthly Fees | $0 (GitHub Pages) |
| URL Structure | /index.php/slug | Sane |
| Content | MySQL | Markdown / Git |
Why This Matters
I write Markdown, I git push, and it’s live.
It feels like the OG blogging days again. We had CMS shit back then, but blogging was largely just writing and publishing. Simple and direct. SEO made things weird for a bit (paid posts… did that) and we tried to mash PHP junk onto all sorts of places for no particular reason. The CMS never really got better, and blogs sort of died under their own weight.
In a way, I’m jumping back in with the terminal Gs who never bothered down this path in the first place. They’ve been over there in their minimal setups, posting random shit about obsolete tech this entire time, while the rest of us were fighting database corruption.
Here’s to another decade, though… this time it is static, versioned, and finally cattle, not pets.