I’ve been using WordPress for more than 10 years, both for fun and serious projects—from million-visit websites to custom apps when the WP REST API was still a proof of concept… long before the Gutenberg editor was even a thing.

While my writing cadence is extremely unpredictable, I want to share more about my journey. And I aim to do it with a simple setup, both in terms of writing and hosting.

Why a “Static Site”?

I’ve been hosting fgilio.com on a simple server managed by Cloudways for a very long time. Honestly, I hardly take advantage of any of the possibilities of “owning” the server. It felt like a waste of money and resources. I’ve been sporadically thinking about migrating to something else for a while. I didn’t want to manage a server, and I’d prefer to host it for free. That, of course, limits the options…

I toyed with the idea of using Statamic, but in the end, I decided to start with another solution and see how it feels.

Enter Cloudflare Pages

I decided to host it on Cloudflare Pages as a static site. Here’s how I did it:

1. Export Everything from Cloudways

First, I exported the site’s data from Cloudways.

2. Install Laravel Herd

Next, I installed Laravel Herd, which streamlined the local development environment setup as I don’t really want to manage local PHP versions and such. I’d use Docker for more serious things, but this is not one of those things.

3. Set Up Site’s Backup with SQLite

Following a guide from Fractolog, I set up my site’s backup using SQLite. This was a cool thing I wanted to experiment with, and helps a bit in keeping things simple.

4. Export to Cloudflare Pages Using Simply Static

Finally, I exported the site to Cloudflare Pages using the Simply Static plugin, by following this Cloudflare guide.

Current Setup and Next Steps

This setup isn’t 100% what I want yet. I’m still running WordPress locally to author the site and have to manually export and deploy. It’s far from ideal, but it’s a step in the right direction. I’m excited to work on simplifying it and maybe base it around Markdown… we’ll see. I guess the next step will be automating the deployment.

How About You? Do you have a blog or personal site? I no longer have comments enabled here 🙃, but you can reach me on X.

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CTO at publica.la, leading an awesome team and changing the way digital publishing works. Full stack developer passionate about building the web at scale, constantly learning, and always looking for exciting challenges. I love to automate-all-the-things and consider myself a die-hard suprematist. All about code and Open Source, podcasts, blogs, and lots of coffee.

#HappyCoding ☕️