Why Use Hugo To Build a Site

First Reason

So, yeah, there are probably going to be easier ways to simply start a website. First and foremost, you could do what literally almost everyone else does: install Wordpress. This is a bad idea for people getting started, let me explain why.

You Probably Don’t Need a Database

That’s probably the biggest reason to not install Wordpress; in order for it to work it needs to be hooked up to a MySQL database. Databases are great, however, it’s not something you really need if you are creating web pages. Web pages are, basically, text files. Wordpress breaks everything up into smaller pieces of content, stores those things in a database. Then, when someon requests a page, Wordpress has to go to the database, pull together all the pieces, stitch them together and send them on. That’s fine for more complex sites, but proably overkill for what most of us need.

Security Updates

As soon as you install something like Wordpress, you’re gonna start to receive alerts about security patches and updates. Here is the deal: Wordpress is the most popular tool on the Internet, it runs an insane amount of sites, so, naturally, it is a big target of hackers. Hackers are evergreen in their exploits going after wordpress installations that haven’t patched the latest security fixes is an easy mark. So, the tradeoff with a Wordpress site is that you’ll be working through a lot of security patches.

Portability

With a site in Hugo (or another site that uses markdown-themed files) your content (the words you carefully chose, wrote, rewrote) are all available to you in the form of a simple text file. You won’t need to pay a company to open those files - e.g. word or excel and you won’t need to go through some complex backup and extraction procedure to gain access to raw content, like extracting them out of a Wordpress database would require. They are simply text files - you can zip them up and often enough, an entire year’s worth of articles would likely be able to be transferred as a zip file.

Cost and Performance

In so many instances, there are ways to figure out an actual cost of near zero - especially with free tiers on major service providers. Performance is always going to be better when you don’t have to go fetch all of your data from a database, piece it together and then send it on.

What is the Downside?

Simple. It is not the friendliest, just-starting-out, easy-to-use thing. You are brought in to technical terms far sooner when using something like Hugo than you would be with something Wordpress. That might not be your game. However, anyone I have ever met, from computer science graduates to my local coffee store owner has said that there is no getting around the technical pieces - sooner or later - you’ll need to confront something. In Hugo, this will happen sooner than in Wordpress.

This Site

This site will walk you through the details of using Hugo. We’ll go through the initial steps, we WON’T start off by installing a theme - we’ll show you how to simply build a site that has a few pages and we’ll go step-by-step - looking at files and folers on your machine, explaining what is being done. Then, when you have some technical challenge - you’ll be prepared to deal with it - rather than having to go to forums to ask “Can wordpress do this?” and gettting the dreaded response “Yes, go to this website and install this plugin and it should do everything you need.”