During my time working at Glue Studio around 50% of our work was developing WordPress custom themes, additional functionality and bespoke plugins.

When it came time to making my own sites, I knew a few things - WordPress is a slow old dog. There's lots you can do to improve WordPress (and I've done plenty of these tricks in the past) but I didn't need the ease of use that comes with WordPress.

For my sites, I use static site generaters, either Jekyll or Gatsby. I build my own templates, the posts and pages are written up either in markdown or raw HTML. I publish using Firebase to build the sites remotely and publish them straight to a CDN for fast loading.

If you've got any experience with HTML and a slight background in development you should be able to get a fast and well performant site up and running in a matter of minutes using static site generates and Firebase. Best of all, it's free.


EDIT: Lots of this has changed, so checkout the updated version of this post.