For the last few months, I debated switching my site to a headless CMS using WordPress. I liked—nay, loved—how easy it was to open a browser window, type words, add images, and make a new post. It was much simpler than pushing to GitHub, dealing with front matter, and all those things.

As I was working on the api calls, I thought, “Why not just move my entire site to WordPress?” I reasoned that it would be nice to make pages with the same ease I made posts with, I could reasonably rely on WordPress being around for a bit, I was already hosting the site, and I found a theme that was minimal and elegant.

I thought about that idea for a weekend, but decided against it. Although the theme was really nice, and making new pages was easy, it proved so much harder than I wanted it to be to add anything that didn’t already exist. I don’t know the WordPress ecosystem like I do Next’s, but I just wanted to write some code that fetched my book notes and displayed the cover images. Admittedly, I never sat down with an intentional focus to work on that problem, but I just could not figure out how to do it in WordPress.

I also wanted to add a few simple sentences to my /index, and that proved more difficult than I thought it should be. I had the markup written correctly, and my CSS properly written with classes styled, but I couldn’t for the life of me get the styles to be applied. Also, the browser on my phone was still using the original theme more than four days after I changed the original CSS. It must have been some sort of caching problem, but I couldn’t figure it out.

But I shouldn’t have to figure it out. I kept thinking to myself, “You know, your current site already has all of these features.” There were a few times I got the functionality close to what I wanted, but I realized with a personal site, I don’t want it to be close, I want the site to look and feel exactly how I want it to look and feel.

This is a major benefit of having a site built from scratch that I didn’t recognize before. I was focused on “owning” my content and ensuring there were as little “middle men” between my content and my content existing online that I was blinded of the huge blessing that having a site do, be, look, and perform exactly how I want.

I liked how Mandy Brown put it in her post “Coming Home:”

[having a personal website] allowed me to cultivate the soil to suit my purposes—rather than having to adapt my garden to the soil I was given

When you have a personal site that you control, you can make it whatever you want it to be. If you want to build yourself a mini Twitter feed, build yourself a mini Twitter feed!

The only real limitation to this is your technical ability, but once you have a site live and working, ChatGPT can help you build just about anything. And when you run into errors or bugs, it’s an amazing troubleshooter.

Yeah, having a site built from scratch and writing posts in markdown files isn’t near as convenient as using something that builds the entire site for you, but I finally realized that tradeoff is worth it to me. I’ll take a bit more friction to write posts if it means that I have 100% control over everything about my site.

If you have a personal site, whatever tool, software, or system you use, it should allow you to do exactly what you want.

If that’s not worth it to you, and you want a site that hosts words, looks great, and lets you write, I recommend Pika.