Hugo Vs WordPress Vs Substack
Let' s talk about - Fun. Traffic. Speed.
Self-hosting and social media publishing free platforms compared
Self-hosted: Hugo and WordPress
Social Media Publishing: Substack
Fun 😹
Technically speaking, I play with the Hugo playground even when it is the most difficult to setup and learn of all 3 compared. It is minimalistic-aesthetic and so fast to generate after changes and offers a speedy site experience.
Substack is fun when you get to post whatever (words/video/audio/chats) or share and restack what is good with fast views.
Faster Substack traffic 🚄🚤🚗
Objectively speaking, simply based on what I have posted these couple of weeks or so on Substack, it does seem traffic is faster to pick up than Google search for a self hosted blog. At this consistency with more Substack posts, views stats performance may be even better.
Look at it this way, Substack.com is also a high users website like Google.com albeit a much younger one. Things do not last forever, I wonder how long or different will Substack algorithm perform moving forward.
My take is that the less greed we have, the less disappointments and happier we will be.
Speed: Which publishing platform is faster and fastest
Speed can be subjective to one’s preference (willingness to learn) and knowledge level.
If you want to explore or insist on self-hosting a site with clicking around without nitty-gritty technical details, WordPress may be an option (I still do not like how cumbersome a large WordPress site can get and the migration part).
If you just want a very fast (or even fastest possible serving) blog or website and willing to put in (just) some initial learning effort, then Hugo.
If you want the fastest way to get started writing or posting varied content without the hassle of learning too much of the platform and maintenance yet leverage from existing default infrastructure in place, then Substack is my take.
Speed of examples sites measured with Google PageSpeed Insight
Below is a WordPress site I setup with just a basic Lightning theme that I measured with Google PageSpeed Insight
Below is a Hugo site I setup with just a basic Blowfish theme
Below is a Substack page with some posts and notes
Base on the speed test, the fastest in terms of performance is Hugo - WordPress - Substack (to be fair there are some existing posts and notes here).
However when we measure all 4 aspects including SEO, you probably could say Substack has the best of 3 worlds - It has better overall stats than WordPress and Hugo new sites, and comes with the all the ready perks of a social media publishing platform 🍨🍧🍰🧁
Why I say Substack and not others?
I am unsure if there is another like Substack that offers the kind of freedom in content types, users traffic, and email-centric subscription option all at one place.
With Substack, I do not have to worry about maintenance and web hosting costs, which type of subscription payment solution, and easily monitor my account traffic stats - this is helpful to know if or how a platform works for you.
Some words 🖋️
These are just publishing platforms, do not fixate, focus on what is significant in life.
These tools, at best, is just a way to save time for the important stuffs and publish whatever that can benefit everyone in our limited lifespan.
Consider saving more time and hassles with a managed publishing platform like Substack.
Hope this helps.
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