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I am, as of today, completely Wordpress free

I run two tiny stores with digital products and I've been using Wordpress/Woocommerce hosted on Bluehost. What an ordeal this has been! The pages were extremely bloated and slower than a lazy snail - slow to the point that whenever I received an order I mentally congratulated the customer on their patience.

I tried every possible hack to make it faster, I even upgraded my Bluehost plan following their advice (when that didn't help they suggested that maybe I should upgrade more (please do not ever use Bluehost ever)).

I absolutely hated working with it, but every time I'd go online to look for other options I'd see "you must be crazy to program your own e-commerce, why reinvent the wheel". Well because the wheel is freaking square!

So I finally pulled the plug, programmed my own tiny shop from scratch on Astro and as of today I am free. Gosh did it feel good to cancel the subscription!

Some good things that came out of it, besides my peace of mind and happier customers:

I'm using Umami for analytics, and that's it. Given that my Woocommerce website had over 30 cookies I thought this would be much more difficult to achieve. (Note to self - question the status quo more often.)

Loading the front page only went from almost 10MB to some 400KB of data. It's still huge compared to BearBlog of course, but still! And it's not just the page itself. I downloaded the backup of my Woocommerce store and it was close to 9GB! 9GB for a store with 20 digital products. The ridiculous amount of resources that must have gone into maintaining it...

I took the opportunity to move some of the services to European infrastructure, such as email service and file transfer. (But I failed with some other services... that's the topic for another post.)

Plus the whole operation saved me some 300EUR/year (for hosting and paid plugins). Can only recommend.