[albatrosstrophy]

I host a hobby website and use WordPress for everything. Even as an entry level user, I agree the amount of plugins are ridiculous.

But it's free and I only pay for hosting. Anyone knows what are the alternatives for someone like me?

[gwd]

I've been looking at replacing my project's website with Hugo (https://gohugo.io). Rather than generating a web page dynamically every time someone comes to your site, you generate the entire website statically whenever you change something. That means hosting can be entirely a "dumb" web server (or a "dumb" web server + apis which feed info to javascript, if you really need it). It also means:

* you can keep everything in version control to roll things back

* content can be fed to it programmatically

* project members can send pull request to post content, rather than requiring a special account

I've only gone through some examples from a book so far, but it looks pretty powerful, and is has good recommendations from others in the community.

I don't (yet) have a personal web presence, but if I do, it will definitely be something like Hugo.

[Theizestooke]

There's also a plugin for Wordpress (SimplyStatic, I believe) that creates a static copy of your site. I use it in conjuction with bitbucket and netlify, and it works quite well.

[sofixa]

And the dumb web server can be Firebase Hosting, Netlify, Vercel, CloudFlare Pages, with extremely generous free tiers and practically zero maintenance.

[hrbf]

Recently, I’ve come to appreciate Kirby (https://getkirby.com/). It’s commercial but reasonably priced. Clean, powerful and relaxed with updates.

[manuelmoreale]

As someone with probably 30+ sites built with Kirby I’d agree that it’s better than WP in many ways but it’s very developers oriented and it’s not really a replacement for WP for the average user.

And when I say developers oriented I mean it in a good way.

[hrbf]

Entirely agree with that assessment. All my clients love the Kirby backend and as a developer it’s a pleasure to work with the system.

Documentation for first-time users could be better though. The YAML page structure took some time to wrap my head around. Also, as it’s flat-file, backups are trivial – just copy the folder or commit everything to a VCS.

[errnesto]

I can second that. Customers really love the very simple and clean UI and I love the Developer experience :-)

But yes it would not be a replacement for WordPress if you want to click together a site with themes and plugins

[marc_io]

Publii is an alternative to publish a simple blog for free without paying for hosting from your own computer. It's much, much more simple and limited than WordPress, but this is its strength for some people.

[doctor_eval]

Last time I looked, Hugo + GitHub + Netlify is free and fast, within fairly generous limits.

Hugo is great… once you work out how it works.

[nhumrich]

Web flow