Why I Left WordPress for BearBlog
Or: How I Bought Myself Some Digital Immortality
This is a re-edited version of a post that first ran here in October 2025.
I’ve just migrated this entire site from WordPress to BearBlog. All 70 posts, every image, every internal link. It took days of work, a DNS switchover that made me nervous, and one epic late-night session where I said “bedtime” and then stayed up fixing links for another few hours instead.
Was it worth it?
Absolutely.
Let me be clear from the start: Cloudways, my hosting provider, was fine. About $15 a month for 1GB of space and an email address. Fast, reliable, no complaints once I’d got it set up. The problem wasn’t the host.
The problem was WordPress itself.
WordPress is bloated. It’s slow. It’s complicated. It tries to be everything to everyone: a blog, an e-commerce platform, a membership site, a portfolio, a forum, a bloody spaceship if you install the right plugins. For someone who just wants to write stories and publish them on the internet, it’s like buying a Swiss Army knife with 47 attachments when all you needed was a blade.
The interface is a maze of menus, settings, widgets, plugins, themes, customisers, and options I never asked for and will never use. Every time I logged in, there were updates. Plugin updates, theme updates, WordPress core updates. Each one a potential point of failure, a security risk, another thing to manage.
And the plugins. Christ, the plugins.
Want a contact form? Plugin. Want to speed up your site? Plugin. Want to manage images? Plugin. Want to stop spam? Plugin. Want analytics? Plugin. Want SEO? Plugin.
Before you know it, you’ve got fifteen plugins doing fifteen different things, all competing for resources, all wanting to track something, and all adding their own bloat to your site.
But here’s what really got to me: the ethos.
Modern WordPress has become a tool for “content creators” building “audience funnels”. Every plugin wants you to capture email addresses, track user behaviour, optimise conversions, and analyse engagement metrics.
Pop-ups everywhere.
“Subscribe to our newsletter!”
“Don’t miss out!”
“We value your privacy!”
All while installing 47 tracking scripts in the background.
The whole ecosystem is designed around monetisation, growth hacking, and turning readers into “leads”.
I don’t want leads. I want readers.
I don’t want to track people. I don’t want to know which posts they clicked on, how long they stayed, or whether they scrolled to the bottom. I don’t want their email addresses unless they genuinely want to give them to me. I don’t want pop-ups begging them to subscribe the second they move their mouse towards the edge of the screen.
I just want to write stories and let people read them in peace.
Here’s the thing that really made the decision for me, though: this blog isn’t just for now. It’s for later.
I’m seventy years old. I started this site as a memoir for my daughter Jennifer, a record of a life that’s been anything but ordinary. Stories from growing up poor in 1950s Swansea, my time in the Army, and the things we didn’t talk about back then but can talk about now.
The whole point is that these stories outlive me. That Jennifer can show them to her children, and perhaps her grandchildren one day. That there is a record of where we came from, even after I’m gone and my brain has turned to porridge.
With WordPress and Cloudways, that meant paying $15 a month. Forever.
Or rather, until someone stops paying, at which point the whole thing disappears into the digital void.
Fifteen dollars a month doesn’t sound like much, but $15 a month for ten years is $1,800. For twenty years, it is $3,600. And that is assuming the price doesn’t go up, which it inevitably will.
More importantly, it means someone, probably Jennifer, has to remember to keep paying that bill year after year, decade after decade, long after I’m dead.
Miss one payment, and the stories are gone.
BearBlog is run by a bloke called Herman Martinus. He offers something almost unheard of in the world of web hosting: a lifetime subscription.
About $200. One payment. Permanent hosting.
No monthly bills. No annual renewals. No worrying about whether someone will remember to pay the invoice in 2035 or 2045. Just a one-time payment, and the blog stays online for as long as BearBlog exists.
Could BearBlog shut down one day? Of course. Nothing lasts forever.
But at least the risk is not that someone forgot to pay the monthly bill. It is simply the normal risk of any platform eventually closing, which exists whether you are paying monthly or not.
For something designed to outlive me, that makes all the difference.
Well, that and the domain fee. Jennifer will still need to remember to renew that every year, but it is about a tenner. Much easier to remember than a monthly hosting bill.
Beyond the lifetime deal, BearBlog, which could just as easily be called “Bare” Blog, does exactly one thing: it lets you write and publish blog posts.
That’s it.
No plugins. No themes marketplace. No widgets. No sprawling analytics suite. No email-capture machinery trying to turn every visitor into a lead.
There is a simple analytics dashboard, but it tells you only what is useful: page views, unique visitors, referring sites, countries, and browsers. Enough to know whether anyone is reading, without watching them wander around the site like lab mice.
BearBlog also has a discovery feed, and judging by how many new posts appear there every hour, a surprisingly active community of people still doing the old-fashioned thing: writing something and publishing it.
Just writing. Just reading. Just enough information to know that the reading is actually happening.
There is a basic CSS editor if you want to customise the look, but you do not need to touch it if you do not want to. The whole platform is built around the idea that blogging should be simple, fast, and free of bullshit.
And here is the best part: no tracking, no cookies, no surveillance.
My footer now says:
This site uses no cookies and collects no personal data.
That is not just a technical statement. It is a statement of values.
It also feels like a small vote for an internet where people can read something without being tracked, funnelled, prompted, or converted.
Moving 70 posts was not trivial. I had to copy and paste everything from WordPress, clean up the inevitable WordPress markup cruft, migrate and rehost all the images, fix more than a hundred internal links that were hardcoded to the old domain, switch the DNS from Cloudways to BearBlog, and then wait for propagation while nervously refreshing the site.
There was a moment, around 2am, halfway through fixing internal links, when I wondered whether I had made a terrible mistake.
Then the site went live.
Clean. Fast. Simple.
No plugins. No pop-ups. No bullshit.
Google was already indexing it within days. Page speed score: 99 out of 100.
WordPress never came close to that.
I’m not a “content creator”. I’m not building a “personal brand”. I’m not trying to “scale my audience” or “optimise my funnel”.
I’m a seventy-year-old bloke from Swansea who has some stories to tell before his brain turns to porridge, and I want those stories to still be here when I’m not.
WordPress wanted $15 a month, forever, plus all the surveillance-capitalism baggage that came with it.
BearBlog wanted $200, once.
For that, those stories have a fighting chance of outliving me.
Simple. Fast. Honest. Permanent, ish.
Just writing. Just reading. Just stories that last.
That is all it needs to be.