WordPress Has Disappointed Me... Should I move my main site?
Howdy, everyone! I hope y'all are having a superb Sunday, or that your day is good if you're reading this on any other day.
I'm going to spin you a yarn before we get into the meat and potatoes of the question. If you'd rather skip all that, then feel free to scroll all the way down until you see an all-caps line of red text.
So, I have been chipping away at a web project that I'm having hosted on NeoCities, and I have genuinely enjoyed the feeling of working on a website from the ground-up. It has been... dare I say... liberating to be able to code in the design of my website exactly how I want it without having to pay for themes that are close enough to what I want, but can't get tweak them to be what I want. This is where WordPress comes in...
I'm heavily debating with myself on if I should just completely rebuild my website from scratch over on NeoCities, or if I should try to come up with a new idea for how I want my website to look. For context, I've been trying really hard to make my website feel (and also look) like those classic YouTube channel layouts pre-Google Takeover. I have found themes are close enough to that look, and even just that old internet look in general, but they just quite aren't there yet, or, worse yet, require you to pay to use the "pro" version that allows you to actually do something with it. I'm not proud to admit this, but... I have indeed paid for a couple of these "pro" versions only to be very disappointed by the lack of control over the finer details... (I have tried to reach out to their customer service departments for refunds, but I think the companies are just ghosts now...?)
So here I am... I have 153 "pages" and 1,048 "posts" that combine to make a website that is nearly 1,200 total pages strong, and let's not even get into the weeds of the nearly 2,300 media files that on the site... (≥m≤)ºoºo
I think the shear size of my website is what has been giving every single static website generator plugin out there so many issues... It's just way too large for them to handle...
MY QUESTION FOR ALL YOU LOVELY FOLKS IS...
Do I...
A.) Effectively just "suck it up" and continue my search for a different theme
B.) Go back to a previous theme (that I did like, but it had some weird bugs in the code)
C.) Recreate the website, by hand, on NeoCities, which has kinda proven itself to be a superior web host when compared to WordPress, Square, Wix, etc.
OKAY SO UPDATE???
I found a setting that allowed me to tell the static generator what things to avoid, so, on a whim, I put down the .mp4 extension and that's what finally got it to work... So I have the site now, I just need to look over everything and see if it's salvageable
Update... again...
Fate is a cruel beast and has made a mockery of me!
In all seriousness, it looks like it pulled the first like 5 blog posts from the site and then chunked the rest... GREAT
Hiya! A bit late to the party, but looking at how big your site is and how you were having problems with that, I've found hugo (https://gohugo.io/) to be a great solution. It builds in less than 1 ms per page, so it scales really well with large page sizes and is built for writing posts in markdown but also supports templating langauages and html. I recently refactored my site into it and it's been great.
Not sure how neocities works with filestructures and things though; I've been using github. Hand coding is really fun and definitely worth the trouble though, imo.
It sounds like you, the poll here, and some of my friends are all in agreement: remaking the whole website on an alternative service (NeoCities, GitHub, etc) is WAY better than staying on WordPress!
It turns out that the plugin did finally work as intended, but, and I really should have expected this, all of the HTML is filled with WordPress's garbage code and such. This plus my other web dev projects should be quite the refresher course for getting back into using HTML/CSS/JavaScript! I've even gotten myself a couple of reference books lol.
Thanks your input! Really! (^w^)
