Published: Sep 1, 2019 by Get.Bible
The most popular site builder on the internet is WordPress, with over 30% of known websites powered by WordPress, at the time of this post. The number of site builders available continues to increase. There are also static site builders and hosting services, of which GitHub Pages is one of them.
Why are there so many different site builders? Do we need so many of them? Well, different people have different preferences. And site builders and hosting services have their similarities and differences.
At certain moments in time, people and organizations change from one site builder–also known as, content management system (CMS)–to another one.
To find out how easy or how difficult it would be to migrate from WordPress to GitHub Pages, we researched on the web, and here’s what we discovered.
Resources for Migrating from WordPress to GitHub Pages
Build A Blog With Jekyll And GitHub Pages (Barry Clark, in Smashing Magazine, 2014) - has the step-by-step process that this author used to migrate from WordPress to Jekyll and GitHub
How-to: Migrating Blog from WordPress to Jekyll, and Host on Github (Tomomi Imura, 2013) - good overview of steps involved, including using a custom domain like girliemac.com
On Migrating Los Techies to Github Pages (Derek Greer, 2018) - “Overall, the conversion was way more work than I anticipated, but I believe worth the effort.”
Migrating from WordPress.com to GitHub Pages (Todd Taomae, 2017) - explains why to migrate and compares WordPress to GitHub Pages
Migrating Wordpress Blogs to GitHub Pages (Akshay Ranganath, 2017)
Why Switch Away from WordPress
- though wordpress.com has a free version, that also comes with ads and limitations
- wordpress.com is pay-to-play if you want plugins, customization, and no ads
- wordpress.org allows you to run a self-installed CMS and that requires a paid hosting service
Why Switch to GitHub Pages
- GitHub Pages runs on free hosting
- GitHub Pages serves up static pages, so it is lightning fast
- no advertising on its web pages
What you need to know about GitHub Pages
- you have to know how to use Markdown (not an absolute have-to, because of next point)
- there are visual editors available via services like SiteLeaf and Forestry (unlike the built-in visual editor of WordPress)
- you’ll need to work thru intricately detailed technical steps (unlike the WordPress one-click install)