{"slug": "hugo", "name": "Hugo", "category": "other", "category_name": "Other software", "description": "Open-source static site generator written in Go that builds websites from Markdown and templates.", "recommenders": 28, "commenters": 46, "warners": 4, "score": 25.466, "rising": 0.13, "first": "2025-11-04", "latest": "2026-10-28", "why": "HN commenters like Hugo for fast builds and fast-loading static sites, cheap low-maintenance hosting, and as a replacement for WordPress on blogs and company sites.", "why_is_quote": false, "has_verdict": true, "sentiment": {"recommend": 28, "neutral": 13, "compare": 1, "warn": 4}, "spark": [1, 1, 6, 0, 0, 3, 4, 3, 2, 3, 0, 5], "listed": true, "loved": ["Speed", "Cheap hosting"], "caveat": "Template syntax", "short_quote": "Hugo (gohugo.io), I use it on my personal website. It has a lot of themes/plugins and very easy to use.", "icon": true, "domain": "gohugo.io", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://gohugo.io", "pricing": "open source", "aliases": ["Hugo"], "verdict": [{"text": "HN commenters like Hugo for fast builds and fast-loading static sites", "cites": [{"id": 772813872, "item_id": 48300867, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48300867", "by": "NonToxCo", "date": "2026-05-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Hugo. It's the fastest of the mainstream SSGs (single Go binary, no Node toolchain)", "excerpt": "Hugo. It's the fastest of the mainstream SSGs (single Go binary, no Node toolchain), the templating is verbose but predictable, and iHugo. It's the fastest of the mainstream SSGs (single Go binary, no Node toolchain), the templating is verbose but predictable, and it scales", "context": "", "use_case": "static site generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What static website generator should I use in 2026?"}, {"id": 763457761, "item_id": 47716110, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716110", "by": "oliwarner", "date": "2026-04-10", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I moved to Hugo after years of suffering long builds.", "excerpt": "I can't imagine picking Jekyll today. I moved to Hugo after years of suffering long builds. Jekyll's stack complexity meant CI/CD was hard to implement and it just wasn't that fast. Hugo wasn't just fast, it had everything baked in. The only problem (back then) was the lack of useful feedback. It'd just build omitting half the site. Now I use Astro. Simple to understand, none of the dark magicks that Hugo relies on t", "context": "", "use_case": "static site generation", "switched_from": "Jekyll", "story": "Moving from WordPress to Jekyll (and static site generators in general)"}, {"id": 803822032, "item_id": 50238877, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50238877", "by": "SwellJoe", "date": "2026-10-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use Hugo published to Github Pages for my blog.", "excerpt": "I use Hugo published to Github Pages for my blog. I've never thought about performance (it's Fast Enough\u2122 when I visit it), but I just checked and it's 100 on pagespeed. The magic of a static HTML blog is you don't have to think about performance. An entire category of problem just disappears.", "context": "", "use_case": "static blog", "switched_from": "", "story": "Removing Next.js Got My Blog to 100 on Every Lighthouse Category"}, {"id": 803819856, "item_id": 50238741, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50238741", "by": "7777777phil", "date": "2026-10-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love using hugo.", "excerpt": "I love using hugo. Also wrote about some time ago how I got a perfect 100/100 Lighthouse score with Hugo and plain CSS. Feel free to have a look: https://philippdubach.com/posts/hugo-lighthouse-100/", "context": "", "use_case": "blog", "switched_from": "", "story": "Removing Next.js Got My Blog to 100 on Every Lighthouse Category"}]}, {"text": ", cheap low-maintenance hosting", "cites": [{"id": 786379280, "item_id": 49148705, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49148705", "by": "cebert", "date": "2026-08-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Static site generators like Hugo are great.", "excerpt": "Static site generators like Hugo are great. If your blog is static, hosting is much less expensive and easier.", "context": "", "use_case": "blogging", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform?"}, {"id": 783674656, "item_id": 48979666, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48979666", "by": "sofixa", "date": "2026-07-20", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "My go-to is Hugo but it is somewhat complex", "excerpt": "> But with AI you kinda sorta should just build your own blog Please don't. There is absolutely no reason not to use the extremely simple and powerful combination of: * a headless CMS / static website generated, of which there are a bunch so pick the one you like the most. My go-to is Hugo but it is somewhat complex * a static hosting service with a generous free tier like CloudFlare Pages/Workers, Netlify, Firebase ", "context": "", "use_case": "static blog generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Exploit brokers pay $500k for WordPress RCEs. I found one with GPT5.6 and $25"}, {"id": 743819616, "item_id": 46488726, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46488726", "by": "nunez", "date": "2026-01-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It was a great move; I couldn't be happier.", "excerpt": "Welcome to the dark side, Jeff! I migrated to Hugo from WordPress in 2019: https://blog.carlosnunez.me/post/neurons-are-firing-again/ I built some automation that helps me test and deploy changes to S3 as well: https://github.com/carlosonunez/https-hugo-bloggen. It's clunky but works for me! Feel free to fork/PR if you're interested, of course. It was a great move; I couldn't be happier. Running my blog is basically ", "context": "Runs a personal blog served from S3", "use_case": "static blog generation", "switched_from": "WordPress", "story": "Jeffgeerling.com has been Migrated to Hugo"}, {"id": 740374256, "item_id": 46273391, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46273391", "by": "nicbou", "date": "2025-12-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love static sites because they're low maintenance. Hugo and a theme would be good.", "excerpt": "A blog is a place to share things you care about with others. It's a place on the internet that you own. You choose the topic and the format, and no one can stop you. Above all, it's accessible to everyone, not just those on a specific platform. I've had a blog for almost 20 years. Nowadays, it's the best record I have of what I'm interested in and working on. It has recipes I send to my friends, context for stranger", "context": "has blogged for almost 20 years", "use_case": "personal blog", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Is starting a personal blog still worth it in the age of AI?"}]}, {"text": ", and as a replacement for WordPress on blogs and company sites.", "cites": [{"id": 764115520, "item_id": 47757220, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47757220", "by": "ashishb", "date": "2026-04-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I moved to Hugo and encourage others to do so", "excerpt": "WordPress was great because of the plugins. WordPress is now a dangerous ecosystem because of the plugins and their current security model. I moved to Hugo and encourage others to do so - https://ashishb.net/tech/wordpress-to-hugo/", "context": "", "use_case": "website / blog", "switched_from": "WordPress", "story": "Someone Bought 30 WordPress Plugins and Planted a Backdoor in All of Them"}, {"id": 762227776, "item_id": 47639236, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47639236", "by": "torm", "date": "2026-04-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I wouldn\u2019t drop WordPress for Astro - but I did for Hugo. Never been happier.", "excerpt": "I wouldn\u2019t drop WordPress for Astro - but I did for Hugo. Never been happier. My perspective comes from enterprise: we use(d) a marketing agency to run two websites. A few months ago I discovered our team was spending 30+ minutes just to publish a blog post written by a product manager. Everything was built on Elementor blocks. Articles pasted from Word kept breaking styles. 20+ plugins creating a security nightmare.", "context": "enterprise team", "use_case": "company websites", "switched_from": "WordPress", "story": "The CMS is dead. Long live the CMS"}, {"id": 803822368, "item_id": 50238898, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50238898", "by": "ct520", "date": "2026-10-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Claude made short work of porting to Hugo and Google speed rankings were excellent even without cdn etc", "excerpt": "Same we moved from Wordpress to Hugo when looking to update our company site page. Using AI to update the legacy Wordpress theme just wasn\u2019t it. Had updated brand and style guide, Claude made short work of porting to Hugo and Google speed rankings were excellent even without cdn etc", "context": "company site maintainer", "use_case": "company website", "switched_from": "WordPress", "story": "Removing Next.js Got My Blog to 100 on Every Lighthouse Category"}]}, {"text": " The most common complaints are its hard-to-learn templating syntax and overall complexity", "cites": [{"id": 779390641, "item_id": 48711915, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48711915", "by": "cjk", "date": "2026-06-28", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I tend to use Hugo[2] the most these days, which is fast and has solid documentation", "excerpt": "In that case, I would consider a lightweight static site generator. It sounds like you're fairly new to programming, so I would suggest a static site generator that is easy to install and use. Zola[1] is less well-known, but it's easy to install and fast. I tend to use Hugo[2] the most these days, which is fast and has solid documentation, but its template syntax is really annoying compared to Zola. [1]: https://www.", "context": "", "use_case": "static site generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Is WordPress the best way to create new websites for beginner"}, {"id": 743827152, "item_id": 46489197, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46489197", "by": "nickjj", "date": "2026-01-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "About a year ago I converted my 500+ post Jekyll blog to Hugo, overall it's been a net win", "excerpt": "If you already write your posts in Markdown, it makes sense for sure. About a year ago I converted my 500+ post Jekyll blog to Hugo, overall it's been a net win but boy do I find myself looking up syntax in the docs a lot. Thankfully not so much nowadays but figuring out the templating syntax was rough at the time. Jeff, you don't have to set draft to false. You can separate your drafts into a different directory and", "context": "runs a 500+ post blog", "use_case": "blog static site generator", "switched_from": "Jekyll", "story": "Jeffgeerling.com has been Migrated to Hugo"}, {"id": 783674656, "item_id": 48979666, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48979666", "by": "sofixa", "date": "2026-07-20", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "My go-to is Hugo but it is somewhat complex", "excerpt": "> But with AI you kinda sorta should just build your own blog Please don't. There is absolutely no reason not to use the extremely simple and powerful combination of: * a headless CMS / static website generated, of which there are a bunch so pick the one you like the most. My go-to is Hugo but it is somewhat complex * a static hosting service with a generous free tier like CloudFlare Pages/Workers, Netlify, Firebase ", "context": "", "use_case": "static blog generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Exploit brokers pay $500k for WordPress RCEs. I found one with GPT5.6 and $25"}, {"id": 743815808, "item_id": 46488488, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46488488", "by": "brabel", "date": "2026-01-04", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Hugo just looked like far too overengineered for what I wanted", "excerpt": "I did the same thing, but implemented my site generator in Go. My site has grown by a lot over the years, but I can still build it from scratch (from MD files, HTML snippets and static files) in less than one second! Also have a RSS feed generator and it can highlight code in most programming languages, which is important to me as I write posts on many languages. I did try Hugo before I went on to implement my own, a", "context": "", "use_case": "static site generator", "switched_from": "", "story": "Jeffgeerling.com has been Migrated to Hugo"}]}, {"text": ", plus upgrades that break older sites.", "cites": [{"id": 803856816, "item_id": 50241051, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50241051", "by": "hn_throw2025", "date": "2026-10-26", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I moved away from Hugo because I was tired of it breaking backwards compatibility.", "excerpt": "I moved away from Hugo because I was tired of it breaking backwards compatibility. I found that upgrading my Hugo version meant that old static website projects wouldn\u2019t compile, and needed amendments. I keep an older Hugo binary around as I don\u2019t have time for that now. Any new website projects are Astro, and I will aim to convert the older projects to Astro when time allows.", "context": "", "use_case": "static websites", "switched_from": "", "story": "Removing Next.js Got My Blog to 100 on Every Lighthouse Category"}, {"id": 743809632, "item_id": 46488102, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46488102", "by": "ldoughty", "date": "2026-01-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "pulled in the repo + version locked Hugo + themes", "excerpt": "I had a similar push years ago, but I did take this approach once step further. For a similar reason Jeff mentions -- lower maintenance over time. I was frustrated that (because my posts are less frequent) changes in Hugo and my local machine could lead to changes in what is generated. So I attached a web hook from my websites GitHub repo to trigger an AWS Lambda which, on merge to main, automatically pulled in the r", "context": "personal site owner", "use_case": "static site generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Jeffgeerling.com has been Migrated to Hugo"}, {"id": 733015760, "item_id": 45813485, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45813485", "by": "stefanos82", "date": "2025-11-04", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I have tried to follow Hugo's development but lost track with its constant evolution and addition of features I do not need", "excerpt": "I have tried to follow Hugo's development but lost track with its constant evolution and addition of features I do not need...therefore for now I follow a simpler path: I keep my data in markdown files and I plan to switch to asciidoctor for good; it's quite old, it's battle-tested, and offers me many options to produce various forms of output; be it HTML, PDF, ePub, etc... If O'Reilly trusts it to produce its ebooks", "context": "", "use_case": "blogging", "switched_from": "Hugo", "story": "Ask HN: What are you using for blogging?"}]}], "praise": [{"label": "Speed", "summary": "Commenters call it the fastest mainstream SSG, and their sites score well on speed tests.", "quotes": [{"id": 772813872, "item_id": 48300867, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48300867", "by": "NonToxCo", "date": "2026-05-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Hugo. It's the fastest of the mainstream SSGs (single Go binary, no Node toolchain)", "excerpt": "Hugo. It's the fastest of the mainstream SSGs (single Go binary, no Node toolchain), the templating is verbose but predictable, and iHugo. It's the fastest of the mainstream SSGs (single Go binary, no Node toolchain), the templating is verbose but predictable, and it scales", "context": "", "use_case": "static site generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What static website generator should I use in 2026?"}, {"id": 803822032, "item_id": 50238877, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50238877", "by": "SwellJoe", "date": "2026-10-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use Hugo published to Github Pages for my blog.", "excerpt": "I use Hugo published to Github Pages for my blog. I've never thought about performance (it's Fast Enough\u2122 when I visit it), but I just checked and it's 100 on pagespeed. The magic of a static HTML blog is you don't have to think about performance. An entire category of problem just disappears.", "context": "", "use_case": "static blog", "switched_from": "", "story": "Removing Next.js Got My Blog to 100 on Every Lighthouse Category"}, {"id": 803819856, "item_id": 50238741, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50238741", "by": "7777777phil", "date": "2026-10-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love using hugo.", "excerpt": "I love using hugo. Also wrote about some time ago how I got a perfect 100/100 Lighthouse score with Hugo and plain CSS. Feel free to have a look: https://philippdubach.com/posts/hugo-lighthouse-100/", "context": "", "use_case": "blog", "switched_from": "", "story": "Removing Next.js Got My Blog to 100 on Every Lighthouse Category"}]}, {"label": "Cheap hosting", "summary": "Static output makes hosting cheap or free, with little maintenance or security risk.", "quotes": [{"id": 786379280, "item_id": 49148705, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49148705", "by": "cebert", "date": "2026-08-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Static site generators like Hugo are great.", "excerpt": "Static site generators like Hugo are great. If your blog is static, hosting is much less expensive and easier.", "context": "", "use_case": "blogging", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform?"}, {"id": 783674656, "item_id": 48979666, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48979666", "by": "sofixa", "date": "2026-07-20", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "My go-to is Hugo but it is somewhat complex", "excerpt": "> But with AI you kinda sorta should just build your own blog Please don't. There is absolutely no reason not to use the extremely simple and powerful combination of: * a headless CMS / static website generated, of which there are a bunch so pick the one you like the most. My go-to is Hugo but it is somewhat complex * a static hosting service with a generous free tier like CloudFlare Pages/Workers, Netlify, Firebase ", "context": "", "use_case": "static blog generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Exploit brokers pay $500k for WordPress RCEs. I found one with GPT5.6 and $25"}, {"id": 743819616, "item_id": 46488726, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46488726", "by": "nunez", "date": "2026-01-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It was a great move; I couldn't be happier.", "excerpt": "Welcome to the dark side, Jeff! I migrated to Hugo from WordPress in 2019: https://blog.carlosnunez.me/post/neurons-are-firing-again/ I built some automation that helps me test and deploy changes to S3 as well: https://github.com/carlosonunez/https-hugo-bloggen. It's clunky but works for me! Feel free to fork/PR if you're interested, of course. It was a great move; I couldn't be happier. Running my blog is basically ", "context": "Runs a personal blog served from S3", "use_case": "static blog generation", "switched_from": "WordPress", "story": "Jeffgeerling.com has been Migrated to Hugo"}]}, {"label": "WordPress replacement", "summary": "Several teams and bloggers moved from WordPress and are happier with plugin-free sites.", "quotes": [{"id": 762227776, "item_id": 47639236, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47639236", "by": "torm", "date": "2026-04-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I wouldn\u2019t drop WordPress for Astro - but I did for Hugo. Never been happier.", "excerpt": "I wouldn\u2019t drop WordPress for Astro - but I did for Hugo. Never been happier. My perspective comes from enterprise: we use(d) a marketing agency to run two websites. A few months ago I discovered our team was spending 30+ minutes just to publish a blog post written by a product manager. Everything was built on Elementor blocks. Articles pasted from Word kept breaking styles. 20+ plugins creating a security nightmare.", "context": "enterprise team", "use_case": "company websites", "switched_from": "WordPress", "story": "The CMS is dead. Long live the CMS"}, {"id": 764115520, "item_id": 47757220, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47757220", "by": "ashishb", "date": "2026-04-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I moved to Hugo and encourage others to do so", "excerpt": "WordPress was great because of the plugins. WordPress is now a dangerous ecosystem because of the plugins and their current security model. I moved to Hugo and encourage others to do so - https://ashishb.net/tech/wordpress-to-hugo/", "context": "", "use_case": "website / blog", "switched_from": "WordPress", "story": "Someone Bought 30 WordPress Plugins and Planted a Backdoor in All of Them"}, {"id": 803822368, "item_id": 50238898, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50238898", "by": "ct520", "date": "2026-10-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Claude made short work of porting to Hugo and Google speed rankings were excellent even without cdn etc", "excerpt": "Same we moved from Wordpress to Hugo when looking to update our company site page. Using AI to update the legacy Wordpress theme just wasn\u2019t it. Had updated brand and style guide, Claude made short work of porting to Hugo and Google speed rankings were excellent even without cdn etc", "context": "company site maintainer", "use_case": "company website", "switched_from": "WordPress", "story": "Removing Next.js Got My Blog to 100 on Every Lighthouse Category"}]}, {"label": "Customization", "summary": "Custom themes, shortcodes and Pipes allow interactive posts, multiple layouts and automatic image srcsets.", "quotes": [{"id": 785473376, "item_id": 49092086, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49092086", "by": "hazrmard", "date": "2026-07-28", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use hugo to build my website and I wrote my own theme. It's clunky, but control over the design/build lets me:", "excerpt": "I resonate with the author's point that I can modify my own website to my will. I use hugo to build my website and I wrote my own theme. It's clunky, but control over the design/build lets me: - Put PyIodide into posts to make ML code explainers interactive (https://iahmed.me/post/poor_mans_autograd/) - Inject custom widgets to illustrate theoretical ideas (https://iahmed.me/post/surprise-derivation-entropy/) - Have ", "context": "", "use_case": "building personal website", "switched_from": "", "story": "Substack writers, you need a website"}, {"id": 774935184, "item_id": 48433449, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48433449", "by": "kugurerdem", "date": "2026-06-07", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "My site is built with Hugo", "excerpt": "Hi! Author here. I just used the Canvas API with some vanilla JavaScript code. My site is built with Hugo, so I first needed to create a shortcode that allows me to embed .js files I created for simulations directly into my posts. About the code for animations being shown, I didn't write them myself from scratch. I used LLMs to generate them. They are not as accurate as what I had in my mind, but it still worked out ", "context": "blog author", "use_case": "static site generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "A Little Explanation of Little's Law"}, {"id": 803822464, "item_id": 50238904, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50238904", "by": "mceachen", "date": "2026-10-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use Hugo as well. If any of your pages have larger media, look into Pipes", "excerpt": "I use Hugo as well. If any of your pages have larger media, look into Pipes to get images ladder srcsets built for you automatically. Very fancy. https://gohugo.io/hugo-pipes/introduction/", "context": "", "use_case": "static blog", "switched_from": "", "story": "Removing Next.js Got My Blog to 100 on Every Lighthouse Category"}]}, {"label": "Ease of use", "summary": "Some find it simple and easy to use, with many themes, including after moving from Jekyll.", "quotes": [{"id": 772717776, "item_id": 48294861, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48294861", "by": "afonsosoares", "date": "2026-05-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Hugo (gohugo.io), I use it on my personal website. It has a lot of themes/plugins and very easy to use.", "excerpt": "Hugo (gohugo.io), I use it on my personal website. It has a lot of themes/plugins and very easy to use.", "context": "", "use_case": "personal website", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What static website generator should I use in 2026?"}, {"id": 743956320, "item_id": 46497270, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46497270", "by": "dweller42", "date": "2026-01-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I feel Hugo is much simpler.", "excerpt": "I can relate to Jeff's \"I'm not a Ruby developer\". I used to have a Jekyll blog myself and migrated to Hugo. I feel Hugo is much simpler.", "context": "", "use_case": "blog static site", "switched_from": "Jekyll", "story": "Jeffgeerling.com has been Migrated to Hugo"}, {"id": 803818240, "item_id": 50238640, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50238640", "by": "abound", "date": "2026-10-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use Hugo for one blog [1] and Zola for another [2], I think they're both pretty simple to use", "excerpt": "I use Hugo for one blog [1] and Zola for another [2], I think they're both pretty simple to use once you wrap your mind around how they structure things. Astro is also great (as others have noted) esp if you want to leverage the JS ecosystem at large. [1] https://frominsidethebox.com [2] https://yakshed.com", "context": "", "use_case": "blog", "switched_from": "", "story": "Removing Next.js Got My Blog to 100 on Every Lighthouse Category"}]}, {"label": "Markdown files", "summary": "Content lives in plain Markdown files that are easy to keep and recover.", "quotes": [{"id": 767781553, "item_id": 47986347, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47986347", "by": "quaintdev", "date": "2026-05-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "A simple directory with markdown files and hugo blog allows me to do that.", "excerpt": "I used memos which has similar feature set. One day I lost my hard drive and I had to restore from s3. Turns out the backup I had was incompatible with latest version of memos app. Since then I just gave up on web based tools for notes. I just want to save my notes and be able to recover them when things go wrong. A simple directory with markdown files and hugo blog allows me to do that. OP how does your app store th", "context": "", "use_case": "notes and blog from markdown", "switched_from": "Memos", "story": "Show HN: Piruetas \u2013 A self-hosted diary app I built for my girlfriend"}, {"id": 779074400, "item_id": 48692150, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48692150", "by": "sesteel", "date": "2026-06-26", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use still use hugo to generate my personal site automatically from markdown", "excerpt": "Looks like we may be going to go back to the geocities days of primitive websites. I use still use hugo to generate my personal site automatically from markdown upon PR approval.", "context": "", "use_case": "generating personal site", "switched_from": "", "story": "Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory"}, {"id": 736346800, "item_id": 46021675, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46021675", "by": "stonecharioteer", "date": "2025-11-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I just use Hugo, and I use Claude to fix the css.", "excerpt": "I love RestructuredText. My blog used to be on RST, because I hate markdown. I moved to Hugo and Markdown because I wanted to put out content, not fight the weird system that was Sphinx (My RST blog was running on it), and ablog, the Sphinx blogging framework didn't work with Furo, my favourite theme. I just use Hugo, and I use Claude to fix the css.", "context": "", "use_case": "blog static site generator", "switched_from": "Sphinx", "story": "Markdown is holding you back"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "Template syntax", "summary": "The templating syntax is described as annoying, verbose and hard to learn.", "quotes": [{"id": 779390641, "item_id": 48711915, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48711915", "by": "cjk", "date": "2026-06-28", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I tend to use Hugo[2] the most these days, which is fast and has solid documentation", "excerpt": "In that case, I would consider a lightweight static site generator. It sounds like you're fairly new to programming, so I would suggest a static site generator that is easy to install and use. Zola[1] is less well-known, but it's easy to install and fast. I tend to use Hugo[2] the most these days, which is fast and has solid documentation, but its template syntax is really annoying compared to Zola. [1]: https://www.", "context": "", "use_case": "static site generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Is WordPress the best way to create new websites for beginner"}, {"id": 743827152, "item_id": 46489197, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46489197", "by": "nickjj", "date": "2026-01-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "About a year ago I converted my 500+ post Jekyll blog to Hugo, overall it's been a net win", "excerpt": "If you already write your posts in Markdown, it makes sense for sure. About a year ago I converted my 500+ post Jekyll blog to Hugo, overall it's been a net win but boy do I find myself looking up syntax in the docs a lot. Thankfully not so much nowadays but figuring out the templating syntax was rough at the time. Jeff, you don't have to set draft to false. You can separate your drafts into a different directory and", "context": "runs a 500+ post blog", "use_case": "blog static site generator", "switched_from": "Jekyll", "story": "Jeffgeerling.com has been Migrated to Hugo"}, {"id": 772813872, "item_id": 48300867, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48300867", "by": "NonToxCo", "date": "2026-05-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Hugo. It's the fastest of the mainstream SSGs (single Go binary, no Node toolchain)", "excerpt": "Hugo. It's the fastest of the mainstream SSGs (single Go binary, no Node toolchain), the templating is verbose but predictable, and iHugo. It's the fastest of the mainstream SSGs (single Go binary, no Node toolchain), the templating is verbose but predictable, and it scales", "context": "", "use_case": "static site generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What static website generator should I use in 2026?"}]}, {"label": "Complexity", "summary": "Some found it overengineered or too complex for simple blogs and non-expert users.", "quotes": [{"id": 743815808, "item_id": 46488488, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46488488", "by": "brabel", "date": "2026-01-04", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Hugo just looked like far too overengineered for what I wanted", "excerpt": "I did the same thing, but implemented my site generator in Go. My site has grown by a lot over the years, but I can still build it from scratch (from MD files, HTML snippets and static files) in less than one second! Also have a RSS feed generator and it can highlight code in most programming languages, which is important to me as I write posts on many languages. I did try Hugo before I went on to implement my own, a", "context": "", "use_case": "static site generator", "switched_from": "", "story": "Jeffgeerling.com has been Migrated to Hugo"}, {"id": 783674656, "item_id": 48979666, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48979666", "by": "sofixa", "date": "2026-07-20", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "My go-to is Hugo but it is somewhat complex", "excerpt": "> But with AI you kinda sorta should just build your own blog Please don't. There is absolutely no reason not to use the extremely simple and powerful combination of: * a headless CMS / static website generated, of which there are a bunch so pick the one you like the most. My go-to is Hugo but it is somewhat complex * a static hosting service with a generous free tier like CloudFlare Pages/Workers, Netlify, Firebase ", "context": "", "use_case": "static blog generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Exploit brokers pay $500k for WordPress RCEs. I found one with GPT5.6 and $25"}, {"id": 797759777, "item_id": 49859986, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49859986", "by": "bloggie", "date": "2026-09-26", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Hugo that is reserved for experienced Linux devs and no one else", "excerpt": "Indeed I use Wordpress and have never heard of automattic outside of HN. I just wanted a simple self hosted blog platform with WYSIWYG editor. There are not many that are free; there are plenty that are not WYSIWYG, then there is the stuff on HN like Hugo that is reserved for experienced Linux devs and no one else.", "context": "", "use_case": "static blog", "switched_from": "", "story": "Automattic has a new board after failed attempt to put CEO on leave"}]}, {"label": "Breaking upgrades", "summary": "New versions can break old projects, so some users pin Hugo versions.", "quotes": [{"id": 803856816, "item_id": 50241051, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50241051", "by": "hn_throw2025", "date": "2026-10-26", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I moved away from Hugo because I was tired of it breaking backwards compatibility.", "excerpt": "I moved away from Hugo because I was tired of it breaking backwards compatibility. I found that upgrading my Hugo version meant that old static website projects wouldn\u2019t compile, and needed amendments. I keep an older Hugo binary around as I don\u2019t have time for that now. Any new website projects are Astro, and I will aim to convert the older projects to Astro when time allows.", "context": "", "use_case": "static websites", "switched_from": "", "story": "Removing Next.js Got My Blog to 100 on Every Lighthouse Category"}, {"id": 743809632, "item_id": 46488102, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46488102", "by": "ldoughty", "date": "2026-01-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "pulled in the repo + version locked Hugo + themes", "excerpt": "I had a similar push years ago, but I did take this approach once step further. For a similar reason Jeff mentions -- lower maintenance over time. I was frustrated that (because my posts are less frequent) changes in Hugo and my local machine could lead to changes in what is generated. So I attached a web hook from my websites GitHub repo to trigger an AWS Lambda which, on merge to main, automatically pulled in the r", "context": "personal site owner", "use_case": "static site generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Jeffgeerling.com has been Migrated to Hugo"}, {"id": 733015760, "item_id": 45813485, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45813485", "by": "stefanos82", "date": "2025-11-04", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I have tried to follow Hugo's development but lost track with its constant evolution and addition of features I do not need", "excerpt": "I have tried to follow Hugo's development but lost track with its constant evolution and addition of features I do not need...therefore for now I follow a simpler path: I keep my data in markdown files and I plan to switch to asciidoctor for good; it's quite old, it's battle-tested, and offers me many options to produce various forms of output; be it HTML, PDF, ePub, etc... If O'Reilly trusts it to produce its ebooks", "context": "", "use_case": "blogging", "switched_from": "Hugo", "story": "Ask HN: What are you using for blogging?"}]}, {"label": "Poor error feedback", "summary": "One user said builds could silently omit parts of the site without useful feedback.", "quotes": [{"id": 763457761, "item_id": 47716110, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716110", "by": "oliwarner", "date": "2026-04-10", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I moved to Hugo after years of suffering long builds.", "excerpt": "I can't imagine picking Jekyll today. I moved to Hugo after years of suffering long builds. Jekyll's stack complexity meant CI/CD was hard to implement and it just wasn't that fast. Hugo wasn't just fast, it had everything baked in. The only problem (back then) was the lack of useful feedback. It'd just build omitting half the site. Now I use Astro. Simple to understand, none of the dark magicks that Hugo relies on t", "context": "", "use_case": "static site generation", "switched_from": "Jekyll", "story": "Moving from WordPress to Jekyll (and static site generators in general)"}]}], "who": [{"by": "benstigsen", "context": "runs personal website", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50265516", "date": "2026-10-27"}, {"by": "ct520", "context": "company site maintainer", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50238898", "date": "2026-10-26"}, {"by": "kugurerdem", "context": "blog author", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48433449", "date": "2026-06-07"}, {"by": "torm", "context": "enterprise team", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47639236", "date": "2026-04-04"}, {"by": "nickjj", "context": "runs a 500+ post blog", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46489197", "date": "2026-01-04"}, {"by": "nunez", "context": "Runs a personal blog served from S3", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46488726", "date": "2026-01-04"}, {"by": "ldoughty", "context": "personal site owner", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46488102", "date": "2026-01-04"}, {"by": "firexcy", "context": "long-time Hugo user with personal blog", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46487243", "date": "2026-01-04"}, {"by": "nicbou", "context": "has blogged for almost 20 years", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46273391", "date": "2025-12-15"}, {"by": "bediger4000", "context": "Linux sysadmin blogger", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268216", "date": "2025-12-14"}], "tags": ["for personal blogs", "WordPress alternative", "for company sites", "for Markdown writers"], "use_cases": ["static site generation", "static blog", "personal blog", "blog", "blogging", "static blog generation"], "compared": [{"slug": "wordpress", "name": "WordPress", "co": 11, "switched_from": 4, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "jekyll", "name": "Jekyll", "co": 9, "switched_from": 3, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "astro", "name": "Astro", "co": 7, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 3}, {"slug": "zola", "name": "Zola", "co": 4, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "github-pages", "name": "GitHub Pages", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "sphinx", "name": "Sphinx", "co": 1, "switched_from": 1, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50237712", "title": "Removing Next.js Got My Blog to 100 on Every Lighthouse Category", "mentions": 7}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46487498", "title": "Jeffgeerling.com has been Migrated to Hugo", "mentions": 7}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48709796", "title": "Ask HN: Is WordPress the best way to create new websites for beginner", "mentions": 5}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49138177", "title": "Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform?", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48294643", "title": "Ask HN: What static website generator should I use in 2026?", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47710007", "title": "Moving from WordPress to Jekyll (and static site generators in general)", "mentions": 2}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"warn": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2025-12": {"neutral": 2, "recommend": 1}, "2026-01": {"recommend": 6, "warn": 1, "compare": 1}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {}, "2026-04": {"recommend": 3, "neutral": 2}, "2026-05": {"recommend": 4, "neutral": 1}, "2026-06": {"neutral": 4, "recommend": 3}, "2026-07": {"recommend": 2}, "2026-08": {"recommend": 3, "warn": 1, "neutral": 1}, "2026-09": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-10": {"recommend": 5, "warn": 1, "neutral": 2}}, "quotes": [{"id": 804302165, "item_id": 50268885, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50268885", "by": "packeted", "date": "2026-10-28", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Hugo as the website framework", "excerpt": "I went with Cloudflare, primarily because I was already using it for a few other projects but I've been incredibly impressed with how it's scaled. I use D1 for my database, Workers for the API and schedule tasks (including using Claude API to pre-review images and submissions), R2 for self hosted OpenStreetmap tiles, encrypted user pet records and images. I use Clerk for auth. Wild that it costs $5/month to serve tho", "context": "", "use_case": "website framework", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Independent Vet \u2013 Find locally owned vets (and corporate ones) near you"}, {"id": 804248258, "item_id": 50265516, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50265516", "by": "benstigsen", "date": "2026-10-27", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "different SSGs (Astro, Hugo, Zola, Lume)", "excerpt": "I've tried so many things over the years, my own webservers with Python and Go, my own templating systems, various markdown converters, different SSGs (Astro, Hugo, Zola, Lume), in the end I've always found markdown limiting, when it comes to structuring and formatting content. Now I use a git repository with a simple git hook, which runs a tiny bash script on commit, allowing for basic HTML templating. The static si", "context": "runs personal website", "use_case": "static site generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Removing Next.js Got My Blog to 100 on Every Lighthouse Category"}, {"id": 803856816, "item_id": 50241051, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50241051", "by": "hn_throw2025", "date": "2026-10-26", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I moved away from Hugo because I was tired of it breaking backwards compatibility.", "excerpt": "I moved away from Hugo because I was tired of it breaking backwards compatibility. I found that upgrading my Hugo version meant that old static website projects wouldn\u2019t compile, and needed amendments. I keep an older Hugo binary around as I don\u2019t have time for that now. Any new website projects are Astro, and I will aim to convert the older projects to Astro when time allows.", "context": "", "use_case": "static websites", "switched_from": "", "story": "Removing Next.js Got My Blog to 100 on Every Lighthouse Category"}, {"id": 803822464, "item_id": 50238904, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50238904", "by": "mceachen", "date": "2026-10-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use Hugo as well. If any of your pages have larger media, look into Pipes", "excerpt": "I use Hugo as well. If any of your pages have larger media, look into Pipes to get images ladder srcsets built for you automatically. Very fancy. https://gohugo.io/hugo-pipes/introduction/", "context": "", "use_case": "static blog", "switched_from": "", "story": "Removing Next.js Got My Blog to 100 on Every Lighthouse Category"}, {"id": 803822368, "item_id": 50238898, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50238898", "by": "ct520", "date": "2026-10-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Claude made short work of porting to Hugo and Google speed rankings were excellent even without cdn etc", "excerpt": "Same we moved from Wordpress to Hugo when looking to update our company site page. Using AI to update the legacy Wordpress theme just wasn\u2019t it. Had updated brand and style guide, Claude made short work of porting to Hugo and Google speed rankings were excellent even without cdn etc", "context": "company site maintainer", "use_case": "company website", "switched_from": "WordPress", "story": "Removing Next.js Got My Blog to 100 on Every Lighthouse Category"}, {"id": 803822032, "item_id": 50238877, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50238877", "by": "SwellJoe", "date": "2026-10-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use Hugo published to Github Pages for my blog.", "excerpt": "I use Hugo published to Github Pages for my blog. I've never thought about performance (it's Fast Enough\u2122 when I visit it), but I just checked and it's 100 on pagespeed. The magic of a static HTML blog is you don't have to think about performance. An entire category of problem just disappears.", "context": "", "use_case": "static blog", "switched_from": "", "story": "Removing Next.js Got My Blog to 100 on Every Lighthouse Category"}, {"id": 803819856, "item_id": 50238741, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50238741", "by": "7777777phil", "date": "2026-10-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love using hugo.", "excerpt": "I love using hugo. Also wrote about some time ago how I got a perfect 100/100 Lighthouse score with Hugo and plain CSS. Feel free to have a look: https://philippdubach.com/posts/hugo-lighthouse-100/", "context": "", "use_case": "blog", "switched_from": "", "story": "Removing Next.js Got My Blog to 100 on Every Lighthouse Category"}, {"id": 803818240, "item_id": 50238640, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50238640", "by": "abound", "date": "2026-10-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use Hugo for one blog [1] and Zola for another [2], I think they're both pretty simple to use", "excerpt": "I use Hugo for one blog [1] and Zola for another [2], I think they're both pretty simple to use once you wrap your mind around how they structure things. Astro is also great (as others have noted) esp if you want to leverage the JS ecosystem at large. [1] https://frominsidethebox.com [2] https://yakshed.com", "context": "", "use_case": "blog", "switched_from": "", "story": "Removing Next.js Got My Blog to 100 on Every Lighthouse Category"}, {"id": 797759777, "item_id": 49859986, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49859986", "by": "bloggie", "date": "2026-09-26", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Hugo that is reserved for experienced Linux devs and no one else", "excerpt": "Indeed I use Wordpress and have never heard of automattic outside of HN. I just wanted a simple self hosted blog platform with WYSIWYG editor. There are not many that are free; there are plenty that are not WYSIWYG, then there is the stuff on HN like Hugo that is reserved for experienced Linux devs and no one else.", "context": "", "use_case": "static blog", "switched_from": "", "story": "Automattic has a new board after failed attempt to put CEO on leave"}, {"id": 788989619, "item_id": 49311851, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49311851", "by": "hakunin", "date": "2026-08-15", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Hugo for static site generation", "excerpt": "My 8yo kid wanted to listen to news, so I'm trying an experiment: have AI generate a news podcast episode every day where stories of any seriousness are unpacked and explained to kids. Topics like wars and politics are ok, but trying to stay away from local crime. Right now it tells ~5 stories per day, but I'm still tweaking things. My kid's initial feedback was: make fewer stories and tell them more in depth. Might ", "context": "", "use_case": "static site generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: MyFirst.News \u2013 AI-generated podcast for curious kids"}, {"id": 787776320, "item_id": 49236020, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49236020", "by": "pSYoniK", "date": "2026-08-09", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I've used Hugo and Jekyll before but everytime there is something you have to learn or get used to", "excerpt": "I have been working on a static site generator. I've used Hugo and Jekyll before but everytime there is something you have to learn or get used to and they never map 1 to 1 to the flat structure of a simple blog for example. It's a few classes of C# right now that parses a folder and auto generates the navigation, links, titles and summary off of the folder/file structure for the 1st level and then subsequent depth i", "context": "", "use_case": "static site generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)"}, {"id": 786753952, "item_id": 49172122, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49172122", "by": "dumindunuwan", "date": "2026-08-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "ended up creating my own setup with Hugo", "excerpt": "Use right tools! don't be a die hard fan of any language. However, I used many tech stacks including Hexo navy theme, Docusaurus, Docsy but ended up creating my own setup with Hugo. If you can see, in the project it's more or html/css that can be used with any builder.", "context": "", "use_case": "documentation website generator", "switched_from": "", "story": "Learning-Rust.Github.io: Rust Programming Language Tutorials for Everyone"}, {"id": 786379280, "item_id": 49148705, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49148705", "by": "cebert", "date": "2026-08-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Static site generators like Hugo are great.", "excerpt": "Static site generators like Hugo are great. If your blog is static, hosting is much less expensive and easier.", "context": "", "use_case": "blogging", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform?"}, {"id": 786258544, "item_id": 49141159, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49141159", "by": "blazingbane007", "date": "2026-08-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I would really suggest you check out Hugo.", "excerpt": "If you don't want to. A blog system. On your machine. There is a thing called. A simple HTML, CSS JavaScript blocks. I would really suggest you check out Hugo. Where you write your blogs? In a certain language and it outputs into a simple HTML. Simple files. You don't need a back end server for this kind of a block. Unless you want. Comment section unless you want a fully blown features. And there's No Fear. Other th", "context": "", "use_case": "static blog", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Best Blogging Platform?"}, {"id": 785473376, "item_id": 49092086, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49092086", "by": "hazrmard", "date": "2026-07-28", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use hugo to build my website and I wrote my own theme. It's clunky, but control over the design/build lets me:", "excerpt": "I resonate with the author's point that I can modify my own website to my will. I use hugo to build my website and I wrote my own theme. It's clunky, but control over the design/build lets me: - Put PyIodide into posts to make ML code explainers interactive (https://iahmed.me/post/poor_mans_autograd/) - Inject custom widgets to illustrate theoretical ideas (https://iahmed.me/post/surprise-derivation-entropy/) - Have ", "context": "", "use_case": "building personal website", "switched_from": "", "story": "Substack writers, you need a website"}, {"id": 783674656, "item_id": 48979666, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48979666", "by": "sofixa", "date": "2026-07-20", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "My go-to is Hugo but it is somewhat complex", "excerpt": "> But with AI you kinda sorta should just build your own blog Please don't. There is absolutely no reason not to use the extremely simple and powerful combination of: * a headless CMS / static website generated, of which there are a bunch so pick the one you like the most. My go-to is Hugo but it is somewhat complex * a static hosting service with a generous free tier like CloudFlare Pages/Workers, Netlify, Firebase ", "context": "", "use_case": "static blog generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Exploit brokers pay $500k for WordPress RCEs. I found one with GPT5.6 and $25"}, {"id": 779390641, "item_id": 48711915, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48711915", "by": "cjk", "date": "2026-06-28", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I tend to use Hugo[2] the most these days, which is fast and has solid documentation", "excerpt": "In that case, I would consider a lightweight static site generator. It sounds like you're fairly new to programming, so I would suggest a static site generator that is easy to install and use. Zola[1] is less well-known, but it's easy to install and fast. I tend to use Hugo[2] the most these days, which is fast and has solid documentation, but its template syntax is really annoying compared to Zola. [1]: https://www.", "context": "", "use_case": "static site generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Is WordPress the best way to create new websites for beginner"}, {"id": 779384898, "item_id": 48711556, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48711556", "by": "cjk", "date": "2026-06-28", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "start with something more low-level and barebones like a static site generator (Jekyll, Hugo, Gatsby, etc.)", "excerpt": "Depends on your goal. If you\u2019re not interested in hand-maintaining the code of the website(s), and you just want a nice GUI for publishing pages/posts/etc., then I\u2019d say use some hosted platform like Squarespace. For actually learning how to build websites, start with something more low-level and barebones like a static site generator (Jekyll, Hugo, Gatsby, etc.), or even plain GitHub Pages without a static site gene", "context": "", "use_case": "learning web development", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Is WordPress the best way to create new websites for beginner"}, {"id": 779376304, "item_id": 48711019, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48711019", "by": "TheWiggles", "date": "2026-06-28", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Personally, I enjoy Hugo, a Go based static site generator.", "excerpt": "I would recommend looking at static sites for learning the basics of building websites. There are a ton of static site generators in different programming languages. You'll be able to to build as you go and learn how the various parts of a website work together. I recommend looking at jamstack.org as they have a long list of options. Personally, I enjoy Hugo, a Go based static site generator. Though if you're unsure ", "context": "", "use_case": "static sites", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Is WordPress the best way to create new websites for beginner"}, {"id": 779368736, "item_id": 48710546, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48710546", "by": "al_borland", "date": "2026-06-28", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Jekyll would an alternative for Hugo.", "excerpt": "Bearblog is a service, not a static site generator one can use like Hugo. From the Bearblog GitHub: > Bear Blog has been built as a platform and not as an individual blog generator. It is more like Substack than Hugo. Due to this it isn't possible to individually self-host a Bear Blog. Jekyll would an alternative for Hugo.", "context": "", "use_case": "static site generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Is WordPress the best way to create new websites for beginner"}, {"id": 779363057, "item_id": 48710191, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48710191", "by": "wasting_time", "date": "2026-06-28", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Bearblog and Hugo are popular ones.", "excerpt": "Look for a \"static site generator\". Bearblog and Hugo are popular ones. Then you can host your site anywhere and don't have to worry about security problems.", "context": "", "use_case": "static site generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Is WordPress the best way to create new websites for beginner"}, {"id": 779074400, "item_id": 48692150, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48692150", "by": "sesteel", "date": "2026-06-26", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use still use hugo to generate my personal site automatically from markdown", "excerpt": "Looks like we may be going to go back to the geocities days of primitive websites. I use still use hugo to generate my personal site automatically from markdown upon PR approval.", "context": "", "use_case": "generating personal site", "switched_from": "", "story": "Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory"}, {"id": 778518433, "item_id": 48657402, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48657402", "by": "KingOfCoders", "date": "2026-06-24", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I host 10+ (Hugo) websites there", "excerpt": "I love bunny so much - I host 10+ (Hugo) websites there and I pay basically nothing (+ CDN, DNS, ...).", "context": "", "use_case": "static site generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "We're making Bunny DNS free: because a faster internet won't build itself"}, {"id": 774935184, "item_id": 48433449, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48433449", "by": "kugurerdem", "date": "2026-06-07", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "My site is built with Hugo", "excerpt": "Hi! Author here. I just used the Canvas API with some vanilla JavaScript code. My site is built with Hugo, so I first needed to create a shortcode that allows me to embed .js files I created for simulations directly into my posts. About the code for animations being shown, I didn't write them myself from scratch. I used LLMs to generate them. They are not as accurate as what I had in my mind, but it still worked out ", "context": "blog author", "use_case": "static site generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "A Little Explanation of Little's Law"}, {"id": 772813872, "item_id": 48300867, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48300867", "by": "NonToxCo", "date": "2026-05-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Hugo. It's the fastest of the mainstream SSGs (single Go binary, no Node toolchain)", "excerpt": "Hugo. It's the fastest of the mainstream SSGs (single Go binary, no Node toolchain), the templating is verbose but predictable, and iHugo. It's the fastest of the mainstream SSGs (single Go binary, no Node toolchain), the templating is verbose but predictable, and it scales", "context": "", "use_case": "static site generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What static website generator should I use in 2026?"}, {"id": 772717776, "item_id": 48294861, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48294861", "by": "afonsosoares", "date": "2026-05-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Hugo (gohugo.io), I use it on my personal website. It has a lot of themes/plugins and very easy to use.", "excerpt": "Hugo (gohugo.io), I use it on my personal website. It has a lot of themes/plugins and very easy to use.", "context": "", "use_case": "personal website", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What static website generator should I use in 2026?"}, {"id": 772363040, "item_id": 48272690, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48272690", "by": "aselimov3", "date": "2026-05-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I like Hugo for my personal site", "excerpt": "I like Hugo for my personal site but getting exposure is a little hard. I don\u2019t want to constantly blast my blog everywhere", "context": "", "use_case": "personal blog", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What are you using for blogging?"}, {"id": 771876737, "item_id": 48242296, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48242296", "by": "trinsic2", "date": "2026-05-22", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Someone suggested I use it to upgrade my Hugo site", "excerpt": "> Without guidance, LLMs tend to paint themselves into a corner, because they\u2019re generating code to solve individual prompts, not thinking holistically about an application\u2019s architecture. Yes this is what I have been experiencing as well. I kind of live in a bubble around my own technical expertise, but it seemed only natural that you would have to guide the model. I'm new to AI as of February. Someone suggested I u", "context": "", "use_case": "personal site", "switched_from": "", "story": "The AI Elephant in the Room"}, {"id": 767781553, "item_id": 47986347, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47986347", "by": "quaintdev", "date": "2026-05-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "A simple directory with markdown files and hugo blog allows me to do that.", "excerpt": "I used memos which has similar feature set. One day I lost my hard drive and I had to restore from s3. Turns out the backup I had was incompatible with latest version of memos app. Since then I just gave up on web based tools for notes. I just want to save my notes and be able to recover them when things go wrong. A simple directory with markdown files and hugo blog allows me to do that. OP how does your app store th", "context": "", "use_case": "notes and blog from markdown", "switched_from": "Memos", "story": "Show HN: Piruetas \u2013 A self-hosted diary app I built for my girlfriend"}, {"id": 765279522, "item_id": 47829970, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47829970", "by": "com2kid", "date": "2026-04-19", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I'm also hosting a Hugo blog, and using a markdown editor", "excerpt": "Amazingly open live writer seems to be a very active project that is getting ready for a new release sometime soon! It is sad that these sort of local apps are a thing of the past. It is all every changing web UIs. One of the blogging platform I use (hashnode) recently rewrote their entire experience and it is now 5 types of broken and they removed a bunch of features. (Their latest company announcement saying that \"", "context": "", "use_case": "static blog hosting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Recovering Windows Live Writer Files"}, {"id": 764115520, "item_id": 47757220, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47757220", "by": "ashishb", "date": "2026-04-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I moved to Hugo and encourage others to do so", "excerpt": "WordPress was great because of the plugins. WordPress is now a dangerous ecosystem because of the plugins and their current security model. I moved to Hugo and encourage others to do so - https://ashishb.net/tech/wordpress-to-hugo/", "context": "", "use_case": "website / blog", "switched_from": "WordPress", "story": "Someone Bought 30 WordPress Plugins and Planted a Backdoor in All of Them"}, {"id": 763457761, "item_id": 47716110, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716110", "by": "oliwarner", "date": "2026-04-10", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I moved to Hugo after years of suffering long builds.", "excerpt": "I can't imagine picking Jekyll today. I moved to Hugo after years of suffering long builds. Jekyll's stack complexity meant CI/CD was hard to implement and it just wasn't that fast. Hugo wasn't just fast, it had everything baked in. The only problem (back then) was the lack of useful feedback. It'd just build omitting half the site. Now I use Astro. Simple to understand, none of the dark magicks that Hugo relies on t", "context": "", "use_case": "static site generation", "switched_from": "Jekyll", "story": "Moving from WordPress to Jekyll (and static site generators in general)"}, {"id": 763406288, "item_id": 47712893, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47712893", "by": "jillesvangurp", "date": "2026-04-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I'm using hugo, not jekyll.", "excerpt": "I've been using ai coding tools in the last few months with static site generators. This is hugely empowering and completely obsoletes most CMS systems. Especially for more complex publication workflows. I'm using hugo, not jekyll. But I don't think it matters which site generator you pick. The key point is using something that is code driven. And then have AI drive the code changes. Basically all routine site mainte", "context": "", "use_case": "static site with AI-driven maintenance", "switched_from": "", "story": "Moving from WordPress to Jekyll (and static site generators in general)"}, {"id": 762227776, "item_id": 47639236, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47639236", "by": "torm", "date": "2026-04-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I wouldn\u2019t drop WordPress for Astro - but I did for Hugo. Never been happier.", "excerpt": "I wouldn\u2019t drop WordPress for Astro - but I did for Hugo. Never been happier. My perspective comes from enterprise: we use(d) a marketing agency to run two websites. A few months ago I discovered our team was spending 30+ minutes just to publish a blog post written by a product manager. Everything was built on Elementor blocks. Articles pasted from Word kept breaking styles. 20+ plugins creating a security nightmare.", "context": "enterprise team", "use_case": "company websites", "switched_from": "WordPress", "story": "The CMS is dead. Long live the CMS"}, {"id": 743956320, "item_id": 46497270, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46497270", "by": "dweller42", "date": "2026-01-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I feel Hugo is much simpler.", "excerpt": "I can relate to Jeff's \"I'm not a Ruby developer\". I used to have a Jekyll blog myself and migrated to Hugo. I feel Hugo is much simpler.", "context": "", "use_case": "blog static site", "switched_from": "Jekyll", "story": "Jeffgeerling.com has been Migrated to Hugo"}, {"id": 743834976, "item_id": 46489686, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46489686", "by": "zikani_03", "date": "2026-01-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "This has inspired me to move my personal blog to Hugo aswell.", "excerpt": "This has inspired me to move my personal blog to Hugo aswell. I have been using Hashnode[0] for the past few years and while it's okay, they recently automatically deleted one of my blog posts which was written in my local language, Chichewa and was one of my popular amongst, even non-developers. Ironically, my company's blog and websites are built with Hugo. [0]: https://code.zikani.me", "context": "", "use_case": "personal blog and company websites", "switched_from": "Hashnode", "story": "Jeffgeerling.com has been Migrated to Hugo"}, {"id": 743830960, "item_id": 46489435, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46489435", "by": "n8henrie", "date": "2026-01-04", "stance": "compare", "quote": "Tried to migrate to Hugo from Jekyll multiple times and have bounced off every time.", "excerpt": "Tried to migrate to Hugo from Jekyll multiple times and have bounced off every time. Don't really know Go very well, but better than Ruby, and used this as justification -- since dealing with Jekyll updates was sometimes a headache (I use GitHub Pages for free hosting and let them build things for me when I push updates). Instead I eventually just created an environment in nix that had compatible dependency versions ", "context": "", "use_case": "static site generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Jeffgeerling.com has been Migrated to Hugo"}, {"id": 743827152, "item_id": 46489197, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46489197", "by": "nickjj", "date": "2026-01-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "About a year ago I converted my 500+ post Jekyll blog to Hugo, overall it's been a net win", "excerpt": "If you already write your posts in Markdown, it makes sense for sure. About a year ago I converted my 500+ post Jekyll blog to Hugo, overall it's been a net win but boy do I find myself looking up syntax in the docs a lot. Thankfully not so much nowadays but figuring out the templating syntax was rough at the time. Jeff, you don't have to set draft to false. You can separate your drafts into a different directory and", "context": "runs a 500+ post blog", "use_case": "blog static site generator", "switched_from": "Jekyll", "story": "Jeffgeerling.com has been Migrated to Hugo"}, {"id": 743819616, "item_id": 46488726, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46488726", "by": "nunez", "date": "2026-01-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It was a great move; I couldn't be happier.", "excerpt": "Welcome to the dark side, Jeff! I migrated to Hugo from WordPress in 2019: https://blog.carlosnunez.me/post/neurons-are-firing-again/ I built some automation that helps me test and deploy changes to S3 as well: https://github.com/carlosonunez/https-hugo-bloggen. It's clunky but works for me! Feel free to fork/PR if you're interested, of course. It was a great move; I couldn't be happier. Running my blog is basically ", "context": "Runs a personal blog served from S3", "use_case": "static blog generation", "switched_from": "WordPress", "story": "Jeffgeerling.com has been Migrated to Hugo"}, {"id": 743815808, "item_id": 46488488, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46488488", "by": "brabel", "date": "2026-01-04", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Hugo just looked like far too overengineered for what I wanted", "excerpt": "I did the same thing, but implemented my site generator in Go. My site has grown by a lot over the years, but I can still build it from scratch (from MD files, HTML snippets and static files) in less than one second! Also have a RSS feed generator and it can highlight code in most programming languages, which is important to me as I write posts on many languages. I did try Hugo before I went on to implement my own, a", "context": "", "use_case": "static site generator", "switched_from": "", "story": "Jeffgeerling.com has been Migrated to Hugo"}, {"id": 743809632, "item_id": 46488102, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46488102", "by": "ldoughty", "date": "2026-01-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "pulled in the repo + version locked Hugo + themes", "excerpt": "I had a similar push years ago, but I did take this approach once step further. For a similar reason Jeff mentions -- lower maintenance over time. I was frustrated that (because my posts are less frequent) changes in Hugo and my local machine could lead to changes in what is generated. So I attached a web hook from my websites GitHub repo to trigger an AWS Lambda which, on merge to main, automatically pulled in the r", "context": "personal site owner", "use_case": "static site generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Jeffgeerling.com has been Migrated to Hugo"}, {"id": 740374256, "item_id": 46273391, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46273391", "by": "nicbou", "date": "2025-12-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love static sites because they're low maintenance. Hugo and a theme would be good.", "excerpt": "A blog is a place to share things you care about with others. It's a place on the internet that you own. You choose the topic and the format, and no one can stop you. Above all, it's accessible to everyone, not just those on a specific platform. I've had a blog for almost 20 years. Nowadays, it's the best record I have of what I'm interested in and working on. It has recipes I send to my friends, context for stranger", "context": "has blogged for almost 20 years", "use_case": "personal blog", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Is starting a personal blog still worth it in the age of AI?"}, {"id": 733015760, "item_id": 45813485, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45813485", "by": "stefanos82", "date": "2025-11-04", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I have tried to follow Hugo's development but lost track with its constant evolution and addition of features I do not need", "excerpt": "I have tried to follow Hugo's development but lost track with its constant evolution and addition of features I do not need...therefore for now I follow a simpler path: I keep my data in markdown files and I plan to switch to asciidoctor for good; it's quite old, it's battle-tested, and offers me many options to produce various forms of output; be it HTML, PDF, ePub, etc... If O'Reilly trusts it to produce its ebooks", "context": "", "use_case": "blogging", "switched_from": "Hugo", "story": "Ask HN: What are you using for blogging?"}]}