Why I tore the CMS out and went static

For years the answer to "I need a website" was the same: stand up WordPress, fight the theme until it looked like the thing in my head, then spend the rest of the year keeping plugins from breaking each other.

This post exists because I stopped doing that.

The two taxes

WordPress charges a design tax and a maintenance tax. The design tax is the editor sitting between you and the actual markup, so matching a custom layout means wrestling an abstraction instead of writing the page you already drew. The maintenance tax is PHP, a database, updates, and a security surface you never asked for.

For one person, both are pure drag.

What replaced it

A folder of markdown and a build step. I write the post, a generator turns it into the design, and it deploys as plain files. No database. No login. Nothing to patch at 2am.

The site you are reading was published by pasting a draft and running one command.

The design didn't get worse. It got exactly what I drew, because there's nothing in the way of the HTML anymore.

What I kept

• The look. The mockup became the template, verbatim.
• The speed. Static files are about as fast as the web gets.
• The ownership. It's a folder. It's mine. It can't be locked behind anyone's dashboard.

If you want one of these, the contact link is at the bottom of every page.