Retiring WordPress: a byte-identical migration to Hugo and GitHub Pages
A while back we wrote about building a WordPress-as-a-service platform on AWS — ALB, EC2, ACM, Route 53, the works. It worked great. It also cost real money every month to serve a portfolio site that changes a few times a year, and it kept a PHP stack, a database, and a pile of plugins patched and reachable from the internet for no good reason. So we retired it. This is the story of moving stefaniapana.design from that setup to a static Hugo site on GitHub Pages, with one hard requirement: visitors must not be able to tell. Same design, same URLs, same lazy loading, same everything. Here’s how that went, including the gotchas that bit us on the way. ...