I was running a WordPress site on shared hosting. $15/month, a plugin that needed updating every other Tuesday, and a Time to First Byte that made me want to apologize to every visitor. You know the feeling. You install a caching plugin to fix your slow WordPress site. The caching plugin needs a configuration plugin. The configuration plugin conflicts with your SEO plugin. Now you have three plugins doing one job badly and your Core Web Vitals score looks like a participation trophy. I got fed up and rebuilt everything from scratch. The result is laserengraverexpert.com — a laser engraver review site running on Hugo 0.147.0, hosted on Cloudflare Pages, deploying in ~25 seconds, and costing me exactly $0/month to host. This article is the full technical breakdown. Stack, config, reasoning, trade-offs, and the one thing I got wrong at first that added two days of debugging.…