Exploring Hugo: A Faster Alternative to Jekyll for Static Sites

For years, I’ve been using Jekyll to power my blog at ozkanpakdil.github.io. It has served me well in production, but setting it up on Windows for local testing has always been a bit of a headache. Even with WSL, the process is sluggish, making experimentation and quick iterations more cumbersome than I’d like.

Recently, I started thinking about creating a PostgreSQL benchmark center website, and given my past challenges with Jekyll, I decided to explore other options. That’s when I discovered Hugo, a static site generator built with Go. I went ahead and created the site under GitHub Pages at pgbench.github.io, and the difference in speed was immediately noticeable.

Why Hugo? #

Setting up Hugo was refreshingly straightforward:

# Install Hugo using Chocolatey
choco install hugo

# Create a new Hugo site
hugo new site quickstart

# Add markdown files under `content/` and start the local server
hugo server

Right out of the gate, Hugo felt significantly faster than Jekyll. The local server runs at http://localhost:1313 and refreshes automatically, making content updates smooth and effortless.

Another big advantage is the vast selection of themes. While I don’t consider myself a designer, Hugo’s themes make it incredibly easy to build a visually appealing site without much effort.

Will I Move My Blog to Hugo? #

At this point, I’m seriously considering it. The speed and simplicity of Hugo are hard to ignore, and I love how easy it is to deploy updates. If I can shake off the laziness, I might migrate my personal blog to Hugo in the near future.

For anyone looking for a fast, efficient static site generator, I highly recommend checking out Hugo. It’s lightweight, written in Go, and delivers excellent performance right out of the box.