Tired of fighting with WordPress?

Learn how to build awesome websites by yourself using a modern tool, explained from a developer's point-of-view.

Learn how to build websites with Eleventy.

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I'm writing this book because I missed the immediacy of the old web. At the beginning of my career I would write my HTML and CSS, put the code online via FTP and that was it.

Last week I had to wait four hours just to get a single line in production because of a problem in the Kubernetes cluster.

Of course there is a place for everything: but building websites and putting them online should be easy.

I hear you say "WordPress", and trust me, I love it. I'm a long time WordPress user and community member. But I grow more and more tired of it.

It's really easy to slip into plugin madness and the recent Block Editor drama is making everything more and more difficult for theme creators and plugin developers.

Also, if you're not using AWS nowadays, it's not trendy enough.

A "simple" diagram about how to deploy WordPress on AWS. Source

In the past few years, expectations for speed in websites have grown. Web users have become increasingly impatient: we all have experienced the dreadful experience of waiting for a page to load only to see it was not the page we were looking for.

I wanted more control on my output. I wanted top-notch perfomances. I wanted templates, partials, some build time preprocessing and a HTML,JS,CSS output.

Then I found Eleventy, and I stopped searching.

Eleventy is a static site generator, meaning that it will take your templates, CSS and JS, process them at build time, and output a folder containing your website. Then you take this folder and host it on Netlify, Zeit or Surge.sh.

So if you want to bring back joy in building websites, you should try it.

Table of contents

I will write this book from the perspective of a site developer used to WordPress, since I think this will be what most will be used to.

I'm going to cover: