Backstory (what happened so far):
The original website was built on WordPress with the Impreza theme. Operating WordPress, however, turned out to be quite a challenge:
- Securing it against attacks was time-consuming (WordPress is a popular hacking target, and vulnerabilities ARE ruthlessly exploited)
- Updates frequently failed
- Several times the file system had become so corrupted that plugins stopped working
- Moving to a new server was … adventurous
Something new was needed
Since the WordPress site did not work at all after the server migration, there were two options:
- A: rebuild it on WordPress
- B: build it with something else
We quickly decided on B. What mattered to us:
- it should be a static website without PHP or similar
- it should look good on multiple devices
- it should later run in a Docker container
Static HTML or a static site generator?
Nobody really writes static HTML anymore - far too old-school. Static site generators such as Hugo (https://gohugo.io) or Jekyll (https://jekyllrb.com/) are the obvious alternative.
The advantages:
- defining the website with markup languages such as Markdown
- using one consistent theme for all pages
- cool :-)
And now?
The Hugo website you are currently reading these lines on runs in a Docker container in our Kubernetes cluster and is built fully automatically via our GitLab CI/CD pipeline.