Member-only story
Why I’m ditching Wordpress for Squarespace
It’s 4am. My phone buzzes as an email arrives from WebGazer Alerts with the subject, “Heads up: Barnard.co is down”.
I visit wp-admin, the Wordpress backend, and the favicon in my browser tab just spins. I’ve got no way into my own site. I drop a message to a friend of mine, a back-end developer and ask for help. When he wakes up, he tells me, “Hmm, I’m struggling to connect to your box via SSH”.
U wot m8?
This happens all. The. Time.
Someone has hacked into my site either via an outdated Wordpress plugin, or is trying to brute force my Wordpress password and has subsequently crashed my site by overloading it with traffic.
I once logged onto the homepages of all of my client’s websites to receive the creative ditty in the top left-hand corner, “Site hacked by hacker”.
I don’t have a clue how to fix issues like this. So, flustered (usually with clients screaming at me) I go pleading to my back-end mate to help me fix it. It is a nightmare.
The other day, I logged into the backend of my portfolio website to receive the message that multiple pages on my site had experienced page errors. As usual, I hadn’t touched a single thing on the site in months, so an automatic update to either the theme, Wordpress or a plugin has caused a bug that has destroyed half of my website.
And without extensive knowledge of PHP, I won’t be able to fix it.
No more!
This month I followed the advice I’ve been giving to my clients for the past year, and moved my portfolio onto Squarespace. I completed the site migration in about two days, and needed zero help from any developer. The site is cleaner, easier to navigate and I even managed to set up 301 redirects so that my old content links after a few url changes.
There’s even an import tool to migrate all my old Wordpress posts into Squarespace, so the bulk of the work was resizing images into a new, larger…
