When comparing Wordpress.com vs GitHub Pages, the Slant community recommends GitHub Pages for most people. In the question“What are the best hosting solutions for personal websites/blogs?” GitHub Pages is ranked 1st while Wordpress.com is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose GitHub Pages is:
One of GitHub's features is a very powerful web editor which helps users edit or even create files right from the web browser, once the file is saved it's the same as a commit. Coupled with pages, this tool becomes even more powerful, giving users a free CMS that is easy to use and create.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Huge collection of free and paid themes out of the box
Pro Pretty easy to create and maintain a blog
Pro Import from other blogging platforms
Such as blogger.
Pro Bulk media options
Pro Widget management
Pro Support sort post by name
Pro Powerful analytics out of the box
Pro Plugins for every occassion
There are a wealth of plugins that can cater for just about every requirement you may have, and many of these plugins are free.
Pro The ability to create and edit files on the web UI gives GitHub pages the same power as a small CMS
One of GitHub's features is a very powerful web editor which helps users edit or even create files right from the web browser, once the file is saved it's the same as a commit. Coupled with pages, this tool becomes even more powerful, giving users a free CMS that is easy to use and create.
Pro Supports Jekyll
A simple, blog-aware static site generator, Jekyll makes it easy to create site-wide headers and footers without having to copy them across every page. It also offers some other advanced templating features.
Pro Supports custom domains
A custom domain can be added by creating a CNAME file with the necessary domain in the root of the repository and adding/changing corresponding DNS entries.
Pro Free tier
Static websites can be hosted on GitHub Pages for free as long as the repository is public. Private repositories start at $7/mo.
Pro Allows for all the git features when building your site, too
Cons
Con Post must has category else it will be labeled as uncategorized
Con Freemium
Plugin cannot be used, custom html/css, Date Permalink cannot changed on free wordpress
Con Slow Speed
Navigating between action took around 3-5 seconds and longer for bulk action.
Con You have to pay even for custom css
Con Unable to set cache expiry, must accept GitHub defaults (which are short)
Low cache expires - GitHub sets the cache-control: max-age header to 600 seconds, or ten minutes. Normally, you would set this value to a year so that it stays cached, and then use fingerprinting on your assets. Instead of serving style.css, you would serve something like style-62c887ea7cf54e743ecf3ce6c62a4ed6.css. As it stands now, assets are rarely going to be cached on repeat visits.
This will give a low score on https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights with a 'should fix' recommendation around 'Leverage browser caching'.
For a high traffic site this may have implications
![Vetted.ai illustration](/images/ai/vetted-illustration.png)