Why Hugo

Hugo is often described as the world’s fastest static site generator. That’s a marketing claim, but it rests on something real: Hugo is written in Go, and it compiles thousands of pages in seconds.

The static site landscape #

The ecosystem has fragmented. Jekyll, Hugo, Gatsby, Eleventy, Astro, Next.js in export mode, each with its own philosophy.

My conclusion after trying several of them: complexity is the enemy of content. If the generator demands more attention than the articles, something is wrong.

Hugo has a steep initial learning curve. Go templates are disorienting at first, but once you understand the core concepts (layouts, front matter, taxonomies), everything fits together coherently.

What I like about it #

Speed. A hugo server that reloads in milliseconds is a daily pleasure.

Taxonomies. Tags, categories, and other classifications are first-class citizens. No plugins required.

Self-contained. No Node.js, no node_modules. One Go binary, a directory of Markdown files, and that’s it.

Portability. The output is plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It will work on any host, forever.

The tradeoff #

Go templates are verbose. And Hugo has historically moved fast, with breaking changes between major versions. The documentation can lag behind.

For a personal blog in 2026, it’s still the right call.

This blog runs on Hugo 0.163. Source is on GitHub.