After having build the blog in Jekyll and hosting it through Github Pages, I found that the more I wanted to add the clunkier the website became. During development, I was also not too happy with the longer build time it took for my site to go through the Github Pages build process.
Additionally, it was really bothering me that with this setup and my free Github subscription, I was only able to get it working when my repo was set to public. Meaning that every change, including markdown, was tracked and visible. This might not be a problem when everything you write is perfect before publishing, but I like to scrabble and have many things in progress most of the time. Also, spelling mistakes are always possible.
Therefore, I decided to switch to another setup, stepping out of both Jekyll and Github pages and switching to the Hugo framework and hosting via Cloudflare. I am now only still thinking about adding a custom domain.