The day finally arrived when I decided to update my personal website. After researching several options, in this article I will share the reasons behind my choice and why I believe Hugo is an excellent option for building static websites.
Why change my website?
I had been thinking about making changes to my website for a while, basically because I felt it no longer represented me and it didn’t help me promote the topics I have been spending the most time on lately. In short, I had to make changes.
Why not a JavaScript framework?
My old website was built with Gatsby, a JavaScript framework based on React. Perhaps the easiest thing would have been to update that framework and give the site’s frontend a facelift, but something told me that was not what I wanted to do. So I decided to start from scratch and, since it couldn’t be any other way, I had to use Go, that language I love.
Why Hugo?
After doing some research and thinking about whether I wanted a CMS to manage the content, whether I should build that CMS myself or could use tools like Pocketbase at least to get going, I realized that I was overcomplicating things and that this would probably end up like other personal projects: an unfinished GitHub repository.
Then I realized I had to simplify things, and that’s when I remembered that Hugo is one of the most popular frameworks for building static websites with Go. So I went all in, and this is the result — exactly where you are reading this post.
Advantages of Hugo
Working with this framework, I have realized that it has many good things going for it:
- Speed: Hugo is known for its build speed. It can generate websites very quickly, which is ideal for developers who want to see changes instantly.
- Ease of Use: Hugo’s learning curve is fairly gentle. The documentation is clear and there is a large community that can help with any question.
- Flexibility: Hugo allows great customization through themes and templates. You can adapt the design and functionality to your needs.
- Multilingual Content Support: If you plan to have a website in several languages, Hugo makes it easy to manage multilingual content.
- GitHub Pages Integration: Hugo integrates easily with GitHub Pages, making it easy to publish your website directly from a GitHub repository.
Conclusion
In short, choosing Hugo for my new personal website has been a wise decision. In the end I am using a Go framework that is easy to use and allows me to create a fast and efficient website. If you are looking for a solution to build a static website, I would definitely recommend considering Hugo.