Netlify

Near the end of 2023 I left my job at Pantheon and in doing so severed my professional connection to WordPress. After over a decade toiling away, it felt like as good of a time as any to take a break from the CMS that powers 43% of the internet (try as Matt Mullenweg might to take that number down a few points). Hugo was my choice because at the time I wanted a static site generator and to learn more about Go. While I never did dive into Go, it didn’t effect how I felt about the choice. Hugo is rock solid - it just works.

The short version of this article goes something like:

Improve your Lighthouse score with this one simple trick!

The longer version is only slightly more complex, and owes much of its simplicity to Netlify (for providing the simple Lighthouse integration and seamless PR-based workflows to test my changes) and Hugo (for making it easy to tinker around in theme templates).

Along with learning about Hugo, I’m also digging through Netlify as a customer for the first time. This isn’t my first time examining their offering. As a product manager at Pantheon working on the Front End Sites product, they were a platform that was definitely on my radar.

In November 2023, I left Pantheon and, as I did so, took my blog off WordPress for good. Over the years, this content has lived on WP Engine, GoDaddy, and Pantheon. Now that I was venturing off WordPress platforms, it was both freeing and nerve-wracking. What was the port for this little boat? I knew I wanted to shift to a static site generator, and so Netlify and Vercel were top of mind. Ultimately, Netlify won out as I think their product caters to smaller hobbyist sites, like this one.