31 Jan 2023 - by 'Maurits van der Schee'
A Hugo website can be extremely fast. As it loads no dynamic data most content can be served within milliseconds. Since Hugo can resize images on build you can ensure the image sizes are optimal. The static assets that make up a Hugo website can easily be distributed world-wide through a CDN allowing for low access time all around the world and scaling up to millions of concurrent visitors.
Popular static site generators (SSGs):
- Hugo: A module-based static site generator with blazing fast performance.
- Jekyll: A blog-friendly static site generator that you can use with Github Pages.
- Gatsby: A whole suite of website-creation products along with static site generation
- Eleventy: This generator is perfect if you’re a fan of JavaScript and Node.js.
Why use a static site generator (SSG)?
- Security: SSGs create content in versioned static assets that can be hosted without a database, reducing the attack vectors.
- Performance: There is no database to connect to and a the static assets can be served from a geographically local web server.
- Scale: By using a content delivery network (CDN) you can distribute the content world-wide allowing almost limitless scale.
What we often don't read:
- Design consistency: Clean separation between content and design.
- Ease of use: It has less options as it won't let you modify the design.
- Hosting costs: A CDN will ensure low costs (even when your site is popular).
When NOT to use a SGG:
- Member area: Visitors of the site need to login and manage profiles.
- Complex web shops: You want a web shop with logins and personalized discounts.
- Design changes: Your content editors want to change colors, fonts and layouts.
Why choose Hugo?
- Popular: With 65k stars on Github it is the most popular SGG.
- Fast: A site build takes seconds, making it one of the fastest SGGs.
- Complete: Many features (such as image resizing) are included.
Conclusion
If your site is suitable to be a Hugo site you should definitely consider to use Hugo. It is popular and for a good reason: it has technical excellence. Your websites will be more secure and load faster. CDN deployments will make your site scale and make it fast anywhere in the world. If you need a good CMS to go with Hugo choose CloudCannon or (our own) UseCue CMS.
Happy coding!
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