Hello World — Why I Rebuilt My Blog

Why I Left WordPress

After years of WordPress updates, security patches, and plugin conflicts, I decided to build something simpler.

What I Built

A static site generated with Next.js, articles written in Markdown, and just two PHP files to handle likes and visit counts.

Here's the entire dynamic API for this blog:

$pdo->prepare(
  'INSERT INTO article_stats (slug, likes, visits) VALUES (?, 0, 1)
   ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE visits = visits + 1'
)->execute([$slug]);

That's it. No database ORM, no auth system, no plugin ecosystem to maintain.

The Result

• Pages load in under 100ms
• Nothing to hack (it's static HTML)
• Writing is just opening a .md file

npm run deploy
# ~30 seconds later, it's live

Zero WordPress. Zero drama.