Hugo is the faster and easy to use static site generator that provides general purpose website framework. The website is created in Go and is available on multiple platforms. Hugo builds up pages when you create and update your content, and allows you to simplify your stack and write in user-friendly markdown. It can handle updates and custom content without management of total content. Hugo automatically refreshes pages while you are editing them. Mr. Steve Francia developed this project, and now Hugo community has more than 165 contributors and 35 themes and thousands of users. You can hire freelancers who have knowledge of Hugo platform.

Hugo site can be hosted anywhere including Netlify, GoDaddy, GitHub Pages, Heroku, firebase, and CloudFront. Without the need of database and dependencies, Hugo sites can run on expensive runtimes like Ruby, Python, and PHP. Hugo is useful for those people who want to write in a text editor over the browser. Hugo is advantageous to those people who want to build their blog, company site, documentation, and website with thousands of pages. The content management system is very difficult with many moving parts but using Hugo; it becomes easy to manage your content. It is open source completely cross platform with easy installation on any operating system such as macOS, Linux, Windows, and much more. You can make changes on the fly with LiveReload as you develop.

One of the main advantages of static site builder is speed. It is the faster than the sites which carry all the burden of heavy weight content management system. The static website gives you 100% control over your content and web design. If you are thinking about to produce various landing pages with different designs, then you should create a static site generator not a CMS like WordPress. As Hugo is the static site generator, so it lacks fewer security issues. There is nothing to be exploited on the server side and not to be on PHP running, so all this make site quite stable against the security breaches. As static sites are pure HTML, CSS, and JS, so they are impossible to hack. As the weight of the website decreases, automatically the cost also decreases. As you create a website in WordPress, it will cost $30 per month to keep it online whereas if you create a website in Hugo, it will cost $3.00 per month to keep it online. It means that Hugo website is cheaper to host.

Hugo generates each page in milliseconds hence it will easily manage a large site. Using Hugo, it is easy to add content. Its installation is easy and has powerful theming and templating. It has the capacity of dynamic menu creation and customizable URL. The theme of Hugo has the power of Go template library and it also reduces the code duplication. Hugo allows the user to create server side syntax highlights through pigments. It highlights code in two different way either pre-processed server side from your content or differ the processing to the client side using JavaScript library. Using Hugo, you can add front matter in yaml, toml, or JSON to your content files. Front matter is useful for keeping metadata attached to the instance of a content type. Hugo supports multiple content types and organizes the syour site in the proper section. Each section represents a corresponding type, and this is to reduce the amount of configuration necessary for new Hugo projects. You can find multiple freelance services to work on Hugo.

Installation of Hugo for Windows

According to your system architecture 32 bit or 64 bit, you can download the Hugo. Those who use the 32-bit operating system should download ‘hugo 0.15 windows 386 32- bit-only.zip’ and those who use the 64-bit operating system should get ‘hugo 0.15 windows amd64.zip’ for installation. After you download the setup file, extract it and add the directory of Hugo to Path environment variable so you can use Hugo anywhere on your operating system using CMD.

After right clicking on my computers and then on the properties you can get open advance system setting menu. Now click on environment Variable and add a new variable for the user or modify system variable. The newly created variable is PATH, and its value is the path to the directory containing the extracted files from the previous step and note that each value is separate by a semicolon. Now rename the executable file in the archive to hugo.exe for simple usage. You can hire freelancers who have knowledge of creating a static site using Hugo platform.

Getting started with Hugo Static Site Generator

After completion of proper installation now create a new Hugo project by executing the following path on Command Prompt or Terminal.

/path/to/hugo new site ProjectNam

Now navigate to project and create new content

/path/to/hugo newpost/my-post-name.md

When you build your project anything added to the markdown file is compiled when you build your project. Download the theme before you do that. If someone is new to Hugo, they may use all the available themes.

Install Hugo-Theme using the following path

git clone –recursive http://github.com/spf13/hugoTheme.git theme

Once you create some content and themes then they are available for you and using it you can serve website locally and transferred to the production server.

Now serve Hugo for testing using the following path

/path/to/hugo server –them=hyde-x –buildDrafts –buildFuture

The above mention command starts a local Hugo server and uses the Hyde-X theme and generates drafts and also posts the schedule for the future. You can find multiple freelance services to work on Hugo.

Summary:

Hugo is the great way to create static site generator. Static sites offer less resource intensive alternative to the traditional CMS site. Using Hugo, you have to only focus on creating content instead of administrating the complex system. In this article, you get information regarding what is Hugo and different features of Hugo. You also get information regarding How to use static site generator Hugo.

Kitty Gupta
Latest posts by Kitty Gupta (see all)