I recently made the switch from a Self-Hosted Ghost instance to Hugo, an open-source static site generator.
In this article, I’ll explain my motivation for this change and the outcomes.

I started this blog last year on Ghost. When I began blogging, my top contenders for the blogging platform were the usual suspects: WordPress, Ghost, or Hugo.
WordPress was quickly ruled out due to its high maintenance and frequent security vulnerabilities. I dismissed Hugo without a closer look because it appeared overly complicated and intimidating. Thus, the logical choice was to set up the blog with Ghost. It boasted excellent features such as Members, a user-friendly web editor, Newsletter integration, and many other appealing features and quirks.

Initially, it worked like a charm. However, all those enticing features became its downfall for my specific needs.
Initially, I believed I required a members-only space and a newsletter, among other things. Over time, I realized that I didn’t need all these features. With these features came a database and a backend, but all I was doing was publishing content on my blog, which didn’t necessitate a database.
What I needed was a robust, reliable, low-maintenance site that was fast, secure, and cost-effective to operate. So, what fulfills these requirements?

Static Sites

Pure HTML, CSS, and JS.
No backend.
No database.
No server-side language.

Manually managing static pages is a significant pain. The solution lies in static site generators like Gatsby, Jekyll, Next.js, and Hugo.

With these tools, you write your content primarily in Markdown, and they compile your code and content into a static site. There is no dynamic content. The static site is served by hosting solutions, often for free.
If you make changes, you push the updates, and the site is rebuilt from scratch in milliseconds.

Hugo

Hugo initially appeared intimidating, but after spending some time with it, I found it to be a joy to work with.
The local website reloads nearly instantly when you make changes, and I can write content in Markdown inside VS Code - that’s just plain fun.
After the initial setup, customization, and template creation, it requires very little maintenance and is easy to work with.

The site is blazingly fast, and the scores on web.dev are impressive, to say the least.

See for yourself:

The page currently achieves a perfect score in every category (on mobile).

I am still learning a lot about Hugo; there are many cool features, and the documentation is good.
You will definitely hear more about Hugo in the future on this blog.

Conclusion

If you are thinking about starting a blog, please don’t dismiss Hugo as an option just because it may seem too complicated (like I did).
It is a very powerful tool for bringing your blog into existence. Ghost and Hugo target different use cases; Ghost was overkill for me.
Hugo fits my needs perfectly, at least for now.

Hugo Logo from Steve Francia