Here’s a listlog of why I ended up using Hugo to develop this website. That said, all pages, blogs and sections are built & managed by Hugo and I haven’t used any external theme or plugins.
A bit about my blogging journey
- Started with blogspot.com ➥
- Moved to self-hosted wordpress on shared hosting
- Later moved to VPS since shared hosting sucks. I needed more independence of choosing my own rig & packages. Try VPS over shared-hosting and I bet you won’t repent
- Built multiple wordpress sites for self-projects, friends and a few clients. It worked out pretty well overall
What’s Hugo btw?
- A static site generator ➥ . Ranked second best in jamstack.com ➥ based on github star. Nextjs, which is the leader is too technical & complicated.
- Hugo is based on Golang ➥ making it super-fast to build websites
- You don’t need external themes or plugins. Everything can be easily coded
- Customize your site the way you want to
- We apps / Sites made using Hugo are bullet fast that will help to achieve those magical web-vital ➥ numbers, thus helping you to rank-up easily (provided you have better contents)
Challenges with Wordpress
- Customization require one to know flavors of HTML, CSS/SASS, PHP, JAVASCRIPT, Wordpress Codex ➥ , templating language etc.
- Keep on updating the core wp package along its themes & plugins
- Wordpress is widely used, hence has more notorious folks finding & exploiting security loops ➥
- Backup-restore is not as easy as it may sound
- If you use a lot of plugins, un-optimized theme or page-builders like Elementor, Divi, WPBakery etc. its going to make your site even slower. Cache plugins will surely help, but not to a greater extent
How does Hugo helps!
- It give you freedom to customize your site the way you want
- Add as many blogs, categories, tags, sections as you may wish and show it the way you want to
- If you are finicky about security & efficiency, don’t look anywhere else other that an SSG. If you get bored with one look and feel, change it to something else pretty easily
- No database involved. The final built is pure static pages (.html); hence no worry of site being hacked or compromised
- Integrate your own javascript codes easily
Pre-requisites to start with Hugo
- Refer to Hugo’s documentations ➥ . Take 1 day and just go through it once even if you don’t get it
- Watch a few Youtube videos on “How to build blog website using Hugo ➥ ” and try it while learning
- Once done, read Hugo’s documentation for the second time and I bet, things will make more sense now
- You should be well versed with HTML and CSS. Even if Hugo is build on Golang, you don’t need to know it
Tech-stack that I have used
- Latest Hugo version ➥ (right now its 0.119.0)
- Text Editor - Vscode ➥ (extension: Code Spell Checker, ESLint, Even Better TOML, HTML CSS Support, Markdown All in One, Path Intellisense, Prettier, Tailwind CSS Intellisense and YAML)
- CSS/SASS - Tailwindcss ➥ . You can self code or use Bootstrap5 or any other CSS compiler of your choice
- Browser - Chrome, Brave and Firefox (to test how the site appears)
To-Do related contents
Some of the contents that I am either writing or will be writing in the future that will help you to learn more. Once available, the item will have a reference link that you can click and read.
- A comprehensive blog and/or video on setting up a Hugo website end-to-end
- A tutorial on Tailwindcss
- Deploying (Hosting) Hugo website for free with no bandwidth limit - E.g., Cloudflare pages, Netlify, Vercel etc. or on your own host (VPS preferably) using docker
- A cheat-sheet that each Hugo website should (or can) follow
- Writing in Markdown