[brokegrammer]

Wordpress is better because it's easy to setup these days, can be fast if you enable caching, and has a comment system, which is a big deal if you want people to interact with your content. Other things like contact forms can easily be added. The CMS is also amazing.

With SSGs, you have a few options for comments, like Disqus, but the ad-free version costs money, it's slower because it needs to load JS, and your comments are owned by a third party company. Contacts forms can be built by integrating an external API. And anything else that requires storing data will require an integration with a third party service of some sort.

SSGs are a great concept but they're mostly for nerds who get boners by seeing over-engineered systems. They're also great for companies like Cloudflare because they can sell you services that come for free with Wordpress (CMS, image uploads, databases, workers, etc). For serious blogging, I'd opt for Wordpress.

[mcoliver]

SSG are over engineered? If anything it feels the opposite. Everything in a text git repo, templated, and a llm can understand and extend. Git branch to test new builds, merge to main deploys globally on cloudflare. Super fast load times, zero security issues to worry about, zero dependencies. Version control. Zip it up and take it wherever you want.

No server side things to worry about. It's super clean. Jekyll, css, js, GitHub and cloudflare is such a clean and refreshing setup.

[QuiDortDine]

Counter-point: static sites are unhackable, require no maintenance and are free to host. Now that I've migrated the website for a local (volunteer) event, they will never have to worry about their site breaking on them again.

Multiply that by every nonprofit without tech knowledge and that's a lot of potential Jekyll fans.

[noeltock]

The nonprofit world is dominated by WordPress, not sure that'll change in the near future.

[QuiDortDine]

I'm not vouching against WordPress per se, just wish people would use the best tool for the job at hand rather than the one tool they know. Sometimes that's Jekyll and sometimes you need comments.

[leonidasv]

The comment system bundled with Wordpress is not enough for "serious blogging", you'll need plugins to manage spam, allow users to use social accounts, etc. You'll also need plugins for caching. Oh, and you'll need plugins for SEO as well, because the core Wordpress doesn't handle the bare minimum of SEO and isn't flexible enough to allow you to do it yourself. And each plugin expands the attack surface to a system that's known for the persistent attacks, so you have to be constantly looking for updates and keeping everything update. Oh, but not everything, because there are breaking changes. And there are versions that introduce bugs or regressions.

But yeah, a bunch of html pages is over-engineering.

PS: you don't need to use Disqus if you don't want to, there are a myriad of free open-source alternatives you can self-host that will take a fraction of the maintenance work of self-hosting a Wordpress instance.

[brokegrammer]

You don't need to manage spam if you're willing to moderate comments yourself. But a plugin to integrate with Akismet can be installed in a single click. To get the same thing with an SSG, you'll have to either build your own comment system and integrate with an API, or use a third party commenting service.

Social accounts aren't necessary either. Users can simply not login, or use their email address. If you still want social accounts, it's a one click plugin install. With SSGs, you have to bake it yourself or buy a comment system that includes social auth.

SEO is a big deal, and Wordpress doesn't allow it by default. However, you can install a minimalistic SEO plugin like "The SEO Framework". If you want more advanced SEO, you can install a plugin like Yoast. With an SSG, you have to build your own theme that will allow SEO using frontmatter from your HTML pages, or use an existing theme that has that functionality.

Adding plugins introduce additional attack surfaces, but if you're building a full-fledged SSG to rival wordpress, you're connecting to various APIs, and writing your own code that could easily introduce security bugs. Wordpress plugins can auto update, but SSGs require you to fix bugs on your own time.

Wordpress version changes can break your site, but you can easily backup and restore your content for easier migrations these days. SSGs can also break your site if you want to keep the generator up to date. For example, if you use Jekyll 2, you'll have to spend some time refactoring your project when upgrading to version 4. Now, if you have integrations that you built yourself, this could take considerable effort.

I don't personally see how an SSG can compare to Wordpress. Sure, if you enjoy writing Markdown files in Vim then go ahead, but for people who mainly want to write content and provide a service that visitors can interact with, Wordpress wins all the time.

[anotherlab]

I moved my blog from WordPress to Jekyll a few years ago, and it's anything but an over-engineered system. I used WordPress for years, and it was overkill for a personal blog.