Goodbye Wordpress... / by Stephen Herron

Many moons ago, back in the simpler days of 2009, 2010, this site was hosted on Squarespace. As a digital marketer, however, I felt some amount of shame that I wasn't running my own Wordpress site. I felt like I needed to learn more about it, so I could recommend it properly to clients and be able to claim that I could maintain and run other sites using the nearly-universal platform.

So, I shifted everything over and began my Wordpress life.

Recently, that site was hacked by the Russians. Or by some Russians, at least. A whole bunch of bot-driven content appeared on the site. It wasn't terrible content, but it wasn't MY content, and the bots were using my URL and identity to shill academic-related content and to link-farm.

I had been considering what to do about my site before then, but this was the deciding factor. Rather than continue to pay for hosting, and to add monthly costs for security add-ons and backup features, I decided that it was time to go back to Squarespace for all the reasons I had been there in the first place.

My friend, Eoin Connolly, put it best;

"Maintaining your own website now is like doing your own auto repair."

So true. My day job involves working in the back-ends of a variety of CRM, CMS, and other marketing automation systems, so I'm not particularly in the mood to have to slog through similar systems for my own site. And while Wordpress was an interesting experience, it's no longer something I'm willing to invest time in. I'd rather be concentrating on producing more content than worrying about the platform.