I recently decided to migrate my website from an AWS lightsail Wordpress instance to Github Pages (with this Beautiful Jekyll theme). While I enjoyed how my Wordpress website looked, I wasn’t a huge fan of having to maintain both the lightsail instance as well as the Wordpress site and various plugins. Back when I migrated everything from my original html website (see a screenshot of KathrynNeugent.com circa 2012 below!) to the wordpress site, I was hoping to showcase more of my photography. But, as time went on and my desire to share my photographs beyond occasional Facebook posts diminished, I realized that I could easily go back to a more static-site solution. I finally decided to make the switch a few weekends ago after spending a solid day attempting to upgrade the PHP on my AWS lightsail instance. It turns out the only way to do this is to … get a new instance with upgraded PHP and then migrate the entire Wordpress website. This seemed like a pain and also the perfect time to move to a less complicated website hosting solution.
My husband, Garrett, has been using Github pages to host his website for quite a while and has enjoyed it, so I decided to give it a go! Besides the obvious cost bonus (hosting on Github pages is free compared to the $3.50 / month for AWS lightsail), it is nice not having to spend quite as much time worried about security risks. It is also a good motivation to get back into using Github :).
I also took the opportunity of building a new website to change the content a little, so I’m looking forward to putting a bit more about my hobbies on here as well. We’ll see how Github Pages works!
