Along with learning about Hugo, I’m also digging through Netlify as a customer for the first time. This isn’t my first time examining their offering. As a product manager at Pantheon working on the Front End Sites product, they were a platform that was definitely on my radar.
In November 2023, I left Pantheon and, as I did so, took my blog off WordPress for good. Over the years, this content has lived on WP Engine, GoDaddy, and Pantheon. Now that I was venturing off WordPress platforms, it was both freeing and nerve-wracking. What was the port for this little boat? I knew I wanted to shift to a static site generator, and so Netlify and Vercel were top of mind. Ultimately, Netlify won out as I think their product caters to smaller hobbyist sites, like this one.
Now that I’ve been over here for a few weeks, I wanted to stretch my legs a bit and take advantage of running this site through Netlify’s platform. Netlify has been around since 2014, and has carved out a nice space for itself amongst the Jamstack hosts. Like Vercel, it provides a seamless integration to your Git provider so you can commit to a branch and sit back as someone else manages building and deploying the final asset so long as your framework is one of the many that they support. To-date, that’s really all I’ve asked of Netlify, and it’s done it swimmingly and without complaint.
This blog is on Netlify’s free tier, giving it access to 100GB bandwidth and 300 build minutes a month (the only resources this site will consume). Overall, I think Vercel’s platform is more polished and their free tier is probably the better deal, but I wanted an excuse to host something on Netlify and learn these ropes, and this site represented a low-cost way to do just that. Additionally, if I want to scale up the site in any way, Netlify’s pricing structure is far more flexible than Vercel’s, which gave me some peace of mind.
While there are a variety of add-ons and integrations, today, I just wanted to start doing some rather simple stuff. To start with, I haven’t had Google Analytics on the site in a fairly long time, and while I’m not particularly interested in the traffic to the site, after migrating from WordPress to Hugo, I felt a desire to make sure that the site was still being surfaced in search engines. Google Search Console and Google Analytics provide good avenues for those insights, and while I can set up Google Search Console without tinkering with the blog, Google Analytics requires that I inject some JavaScript.
I could do this by adding the <script> tags directly to the source, but Netlify offers a tool called snippet injection, that runs as a post-processing step to your deploy and can put arbitrary JavaScript snippets in the <head> or at the end of the <body> tags of your site. After setting up Google Analytics, this was incredibly easy. Well done, Netlify.
Next, Google Search Console had identified a few URLs that were no longer indexed, likely a result of changing permalink structure as I migrated content (even though I took care to not futz with too much). Fortunately, Netlify provides a simple way to manage redirects through a _redirects file that you can add to the top-level directory in your site. After going through Google Search Console and finding URLs that were broken, I added the _redirects file with the proper rules and deployed. Here, I ran into a bit of a problem as Netlify expects the _redirects file to be in your publish directory, which for me is a directory that is in my .gitignore as I don’t want to version it. So instead, I added the redirect rules to the netlify.toml file and I was on my way.
The boring and mundane work out of the way, I shifted gears to adding Netlify’s Lighthouse integration that generates a Lighthouse report after every build. My current scores are pretty low given that I’m running a static site, so I have some optimizations ahead of me!
Overall, gotta say that Netlify really impressed me in this round. Everything that I wanted to do, I could do with ease. Great product experience.