Switching to Jekyll for blogging?

I cleaned up my WordPress the last few days, got rid of plugins I didn‘t need anymore, removed all unnecessary themes and made some performance optimizations to the current theme. Through that process, I thought about how to improve it even further and how to speed up my writing process. The reason I asked myself is that right now, during commuting, I don‘t write my Blog Post drafts directly in WordPress but in Bear, the Markdown Notes App for Mac and iOS. I don‘t always want to make a hotspot and connect to WordPress and write in there. And yeah I know there‘s a WordPress app but I love the clean and simple look and feel of Bear. So once at home, I copy the content from Bear to WordPress and let Grammarly correct any spelling or grammar mistakes before publishing it.

Now a much easier approach would be to publish the markdown “Files” directly to WordPress. Well, Ulysses does that, but they‘ve recently changed their pricing model and it got a bit too expensive (but maybe I should check that out once again? Maybe I‘m missing out on something). So then I googled a bit and stumbled upon Jekyll. Jekyll‘s approach is to commit markdown files to Github and then together with a template structure a simple and fast webpage is built. There‘s no database anymore because every markdown file is a Page (or Blog Post).

For simple pages, this is a genius approach but I‘m not sure how I would feel leaving WordPress behind. I‘ve come so accustomed to it and I love the flexibility of just adding plugins if I need something special, maybe even open up comments one day or I don‘t know what the future holds. But I think when it comes to speed, I did make some improvements with last week's optimization and this theme in general. And I will continue the trend of avoiding any CSS frameworks or jQuery. With Flexbox or CSS Grid there‘s really no need for a Grid Framework anymore and jQuery can be a bloated framework if you just use it out of convenience, vanilla JavaScript is sometimes the better approach.

So I will stick with WordPress and instead try to minimize dependencies on external sources. That sounds like a good plan, for now.