Nope, this is not a thinkpiece about the future of the WordPress ecosystem, it’s my notes on migrating this website off of WordPress-dot-com and setting aside other Automattic products where possible.
This website has moved! I mean, it’s still at the same URL, so you probably haven’t noticed much, but since I left Automattic, I’ve been managing a rolling migration as I move all my personal and professional and family business and various other websites off WordPress-dot-com hosting, away from Jetpack, and as much as possible, to run healthy, performant, and secure WordPress sites using open source software and paid hosting from other providers.
Thanks to generous policies related to using paid plans from Automattic while I worked there (as long as I supported the sites myself), I have a few more things to migrate or otherwise turn off for other sites, but ryansholin.com is now hosted at Hostinger. (That’s not an affiliate link, and this isn’t an endorsement or advertisement, I’m just stating facts.) So far, it’s been fine.
Every low-cost WordPress host is similar in many ways; the differences are at the edges of support, documentation, dashboards, migrations, file access, and notably, uptime. Hostinger’s obviously AI bot-driven support chat has been… KINDA GREAT. Especially compared to another low-cost host I tried using for a different site at one point last year, which… was bad. The AI was much, much better than the humans at taking my issues at face value and troubleshooting them in a logical way. Of course, I know a human being had to write the docs first, or the bot wouldn’t have much to go on, but if you have a choice in 2025, I can tell you I had a solid experience with Hostinger.
At minimum, the AI chat makes for a better rubber duck.
What problems could I have with my 20-year-old WordPress website that I’ve moved among at least four hosts that I can think of offhand, along with migrations from Blogger and an increasingly dated import of thousands of Delicious bookmarks before that product died? Plenty!
Images were the most damaged bit of stuff, and they had been for a while. Somewhere along the way, two things happened to all the images on this website:
- During some iteration where I used the Jetpack Image CDN, some Jetpack image URLs were hardcoded into posts in my database. I don’t remember the sequence of events that did that, or quite how I solved it. Useful bug report, I know.
- During a prior migration, quite possibly when I moved from Webfaction to WordPress-dot-com, lots of my image file names were appended with a random five-character preface. So instead of something like
fishbowl-005.jpgwhich would’ve been referenced in the Media Libary, posts, and the database, every image URL for a certain span of time was something likex878j-fishbowl-005.jpgwhich broke lots of images used in posts and pages. No, I don’t know how that happened, though I fixed it in the end by running some regex script to remove the first six characters of every image filename in certain folders before I uploaded them to the new site on the last (successful) attempt. Then I used a plugin to scan the Uploads folders and properly index the images in the database and Media Library with their original URLs.
WordPress, am I right?! 😅
Because I know how to party, I’m thinking about building a list of broken external links and removing many of those old Delicious bookmark posts, but until I get to that, I’ve written a pleasant little plugin to add a pleasant little warning to any posts older than five years:
Does what it says on the tin.
Speaking of context and cautious optimism, I’ve also been experimenting with some of the carbon emissions plugins for WordPress that let you (and site visitors) know what the estimated emissions are for any given post or page. You might spot a mention of it at the bottom of this post (if you’re reading this in your email inbox, or (gasp) a feed reader, you’ll obvi need to click through). It might say there’s not enough data yet, but if enough of you look at the website and click around, it might start showing some data. We’ll see.
One More Thing
If you’re reading this in your inbox because you previously subscribed to get updates by email, I am either pleasantly surprised, or I have been diligently whittling away at an email template and formatting this post as a campaign. I don’t love the available free solutions to replace the “Subscribe By Email” features from WordPress-dot-com and/or Jetpack. If things went wrong with this email, or it was a surprise you don’t remember signing up for, or you have read this far and are in a mood to manage your preferences, hopefully there are some links below this paragraph to do that sort of thing.
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