I just finished moving my website and blog over to Jekyll from WordPress. I also moved the hosting over to GitHub. The process wasn't overly complex with the Jekyll migration options available, but it was a bit time consuming, making sure things were back to normal. Converting the WordPress theme to the Liquid template system took a bit of time as well.

Why Did I Move?

• I wanted to learn something new. Jekyll is a static site generator written in Ruby.
• I was having trouble accessing the old site due to some DNS issues with my provider which was preventing updates and new posts.
• I want to have the content under source control, and primarily use Git and GitHub.
• I like writing in Markdown, and WordPress was doing some funky formatting with my content.
• I got tired of having to update WordPress and it's plugins whenever there was some security issue with it or new version that came out.
• I'm addicted to GitHub, though, this won't be a reason for everyone.

As always, there's pros and cons to any system you use. These are the ones that I've had so far on the move.

Pros

• It's on GitHub
• It's super fast with a 100 out of 100 score on Google PageSpeed
• I can move it to Heroku or Engine Yard AppCloud if I ever need to with Rack-Jekyll
• Focus on Content and not worry about system updates
• Not PHP

Cons

• Loss of Dynamic content management, ie. Photo Gallery, Comments, Search, etc.
• Required paid GitHub account (cheapest is $7 per month.)
• No Database - if you need a database and all.

Overall

I'm very happy with having Jekyll as the platform and GitHub as the hosting. It's allowing me to focus on what's important. Content. While there are some annoyances and issues with the losses, I've found that many of them are rather trivial and simple to overcome.

Overcoming the Cons

Comments are set up through Disqus which I was previously using anyway.

Search is now handled by Google Custom Search instead of the default WordPress search.

Tags and Categories are still an issue I plan to look at eventually, though there are plugins and extensions to Jekyll out there. Jekyll does support categories, but my permalinks structure is currently blocking use of the categories.

For the image hosting, I'm currently considering using Google Storage, Amazon's S3 and CloudFront or just Flickr. Leaning towards Google Storage, primarily because learning is fun.