Hugo is a super faststatic site generator that's here to save you time and make your site fast, secure, and inexpensive tohost. There's just one catch, your current website is already on WordPress™. This course will guide you through safely migrating your site and your workflowfrom WordPress to Hugo.

NOTE: Some of the earlier course content is out of date, because Hugo has continued to advance since I started creating this course a few years ago. There is still a TONof great content here, but a little "elbow grease" may be required to get things working on your machine.

NOTE2: As of August 22 I don't have time to finish and update this course. :'( If you are an experienced course content creator and would like to take over the superhero cape, reach out to me on LinkedIn.

Background:

WordPress is the most popular website management system in the world. And with good reason: it's easy to get up and running, and there is a rich ecosystem of beautifulthemes and feature-enhancing plugins.

However, (queue the eerie mood music), WordPress has is faults...

• Every year, security vulnerabilities are discovered in WordPress and itsunderlying programminglanguage, PHP.

• Content is served dynamically, so site performance suffers. Getting a solid PageSpeed rankingrequires lots ofof time,plugins, andhacks.

• Good hosting options can be quite expensive.

• Itsdatabase back-endlimits hosting options and complicates backupand recovery.

But here's a secret you probably already know:Today, the vast majority of sites don't need to be on WordPress. Most sites serve static, or unchanging, content. For example, I'm doing good if I can publish to my blog once a month or so. So why was Iusing a Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress? In my case, I didn't want to have to write my posts as HTML, upload them over FTP, update index pages to include my new post, manually add pagination, headers, footers, format images, etc. WordPress automated all of this. For the most part, all I had to do was focus on the content; WordPress took care of the rest. It was glorious!

That was the early 2000s. Nowadays we have static site generators like Hugo! With Hugo, I justwrite my blog post.Then Hugo generates my entire site, including all of those updatedlinks, headers, footers, even a sitemap. And get this: it does it in about1 second. Then, with a single command I can push my updated site to a service like Netlify, and my new post is live within a few minutes.

With Hugo, you get:

• Ultra-fast site generation

• Free hosting options

• More security because there is no database or run-time to hack

• Static pages are faster to serve and easy to cache. A faster site means better SEO.

• Backups are essentially unnecessary if you store your repo on GitHub or GitLab.

• Change tracking comes forfree if you store your site in a Git repo.

Of course, for long-time WordPress users like myself,a number of questions come up:

• What about my SEOplugin (yoast)? (Coming)

• What about mysyntax highlighting plugin(for tech blogs)? (Coming)

• What about my comments!? (Coming)

• What about my cool theme? Can I port it Hugo? (In progress)

• What about help with spelling, grammar, writingstyle? (Coming)

• What about advanced plugins for asset bundling, minification, etc? (In progress)

Learn all this and more with this comprehensive course. Enjoy!