According to Wikipedia, WordPress runs on 60% of the world’s websites. I have used it to create websites in the last few years, and my company offers WordPress hosting services for our clients based on a dedicated Plesk server on AWS.

I use a ton of plugins on WordPress, and have even created my own theme, based on Genesis Framework.

I have also investigated Ghost, an alternative to WordPress based on a more modern codebase (it’s written in Node.js rather than PHP). Ghost has built in SEO and membership/subscription features, and has a nice theming system. I have written a few themes for Ghost. Ghost can also be used as a headless CMS (actually, WordPress can as well through it’s REST API).

Then there is Hugo, a really popular static site generator. I really like Hugo, even though there is a steep learning curve. I am currently trying to write a theme for Hugo.

WordPress - so 1990s

My main issue with WordPress was that it is slow and clunky. It is PHP server side rendering using an SQL backend. I have never bothered learning PHP and don’t intend to, so tinkering under the hood was always going to be a bridge too far for me.

WordPress is also cumbersome. A highly functional site requires dozens of plugins to manage things like image galleries, SEO, security, caching, backups, plus UI enhancements. All these needed to be regularly updated, and can even break with a major WordPress release.

WordPress is also in the middle of transitioning to a page builder system (called Full Site Editing, based on Gutenberg), and the front end of WordPress is now as much React as PHP. I can imagine in the future WordPress may evolve into a static React frontend and a headless PHP backend. Whilst WordPress is transitioning, I thought it may be worthwhile to check out alternatives.

I attended the Jamstack conference and Nextjs conference in October 2020 and was fired up to learn Nextjs and write my first app. My main motivation is to use this site as an excuse for learning and experimenting with NextJS.

Disadvantages of NextJS

If you are reading this and considering following down the same path as me, let’s get through the cons first.

You are not writing content using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, you are writing code. Javascript, HTML, CSS … you are pretty much building the website from scratch.

If this scares you, then you are probably not ready to create a blog in NextJS.

Of course, you don’t have to start from nothing. There are starter kits, UI components, even other people’s blogs on Github that you can clone and fork. You can also easily connect to a Headless CMS (Content Management System) and get the benefits of WYSIMWYG (What You See Is Mostly What You Get) and have all the hard bits of content management already handled for you.

However, NextJS is still a maturing web framework, so don’t expect a rich plugin and theme ecosystem compared to, say, Gatsby. Or Hugo. Or Ghost. Or cough cough … WordPress.

Advantages of NextJS

First of all, we get all the advantages of Jamstack. NextJS supports both server side rendering and static prerendered content that can be served entirely from a CDN (Content Distribution Network). A NextJS blog can be deployed completely serverless for zero cost (provided you are not too picky about domain names).

A static, serverless web site cannot be hacked, because there is no spoon server.

Thirdly, static web sites are blazingly fast, which is good for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Since all the content is prerendered and delivered from a CDN, page load speed is determined by content size and not complexity.

NextJS leverages React and the npm ecosystem. Compared to WordPress plugins which usually cost money (per year), npm packages are open source and there is a rich set of UI components, frameworks and functionality that is just one yarn or npm install away.

NextJS is so hot right now, mainly because it is relatively easy to learn, is Typescript native, and offers a useful foundation without too mainly complications. I have previously learnt Gatsby, and while it is undeniably more powerful than NextJS and has a richer ecosystem, there are still lots of things in Gatsby I don’t understand or haven’t mastered yet.

Finally, I like building a website in code. I can do anything I want, have complete design freedom, and I can creach rich dynamic experiences without being restricted by a theme, or a plugin, or trying to figure out how WordPress works.