I’ve run WordPress website for my blog for years, but I’ve switched to cloudflare.pages.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- It’s free. I’ve paid about $10 per month for the shared web hosting service by bluehost. It’s one of the cheapest plan out there but still expensive to me.
- Your repo can be private. Github.pages is also free but you need to publicize your repo unless you suscribe some paid plan. With Cloudflare.pages, you can use private repos on Github.
- It’s lightweight and secure. Since only static content is allowed, it’s deemed to be so compared to dynamic websites.
Cons:
- No dynamic content. I use Jekyll to make my blog look liked dynamic but it doesn’t allow real-time updates, content generation or interaction with databases. You need to redeploy every time when you make a change even if it’s a tiny edit.
- Lack of CMS features or plugin ecosystems. You have to update content through code versioning via git. It can be hard for non tech people.
- Not much scalability. It’s not a problem for an obscure personal blog like this, but if you run a popular website and have tens of thousands of viewers per day, you should choose more robust options.
Resources
I’ll list useful resources for setting up a blog using Cloudflare.pages for later reference.
Jekyll
This is a official documentation of Jekyll. You should read through it if you use Jekyll. I’ve wasted enough time just because I didn’t realize I need to set a front matter block for each post file.
Migrating a Jekyll based site from Github Pages
After you set up your blog on github.pages, this is all you need.