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Welcome to zeljkovic.sh - V2.0

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After almost 2 years since zeljkovic.sh is launched, I decided it is time to move away from WordPress to something else. In this article, I'm going to explain the reasons and decisions made.

The beginnings

When I made a decision to launch zeljkovic.sh two years ago, I wanted a solution that I could quickly deploy and start delivering content immediately. The solution that I have chosen was:

Although the full setup was not as straightforward as I expected, it did the work, and I was able to launch it without major issues. The monthly costs of this setup were around $6 per month.

Problems

As I already mentioned, the setup itself was not very smooth, since some theme customizations and configurations were difficult to make. The other problems that I was facing along the way were:

  • plugins learning curve
  • freemium plugins — limited functionality and spam
  • limited customization capabilities
  • painful updates of plugins, WordPress, PHP and MySQL
  • lack of overview and control over static assets
  • not being able to keep track of the configuration changes

Because of the problems above, I finally made a decision to migrate my website to something more appropriate for my preferences.

Migration to Next.js and Vercel

After some investigation and small POCs, I decided to move forward with Next.js as an underlying framework. As a baseline template, I am using https://github.com/timlrx/tailwind-nextjs-starter-blog, modified to match my needs. The website is deployed to Vercel, where I'm using a Hobby free plan. The gains that I got with this migration are:

  • full control over all functional and visual components of the website
  • articles written in .mdx which make them easier to customize and track changes
  • no backup needed (everything is on GitHub)
  • infrastructure is managed by Vercel
  • lower costs
  • out of the box web vitals analytics
  • out of the box audience analytics
  • superb performance
Lighthouse score
Lighthouse score

I hope you like the new look and feel of zeljkovic.sh, and I'm looking forward to making some new interesting content this year!