Hugo: The Best Option for Blogging Site

By Rishav Bhardwaj

- 5 minutes read - 903 words

This article will discuss why the Hugo framework stands out as the top choice for developers seeking to build a blogging sites.

Before creating any website, it’s crucial to consider three key questions:

  1. Monthly expenses
  2. Security
  3. Development time

so the best option will be the one who score low in monthly expenses and development time while high in security.

First, let’s clear up the doubt: “What is Hugo?” if you don’t know or haven’t heard about it yet!

Hugo is a web framework to generate static sites (sites that don’t communicate with the server to display content).

Now that this question is clear, we can move forward and understand what other ways there are to get a blogging site.

There are two paths to choose from for blogging sites:

  1. The first is to use services from other blogging sites like Medium, Blogger/Blogspot where you don’t have to host or manage your own site.
  2. And the second option is to host yourself.

The first option is the simplest to get up and running with, but it comes with lots of restrictions! like you can’t customize the look of your medium blog and you can’t integrate your AdSense account to earn directly from Google AD services in Medium and maybe getting your account banned if you’ve written about something against their TOCs.

The second option is the most flexible option for anyone who wants to control every single aspect of his or her site, from looks to ad revenue. but it also comes with headaches for inexperienced people. One has to maintain it regularly and apply security patches; if not, then your site is vulnerable and can get hacked.

Anyone who is serious about earning from blogging or content writing will always choose the second option.

So, let’s explore more the second option. Inexperienced people who are not developers use some kind of CMS to write and manage blogs.

You are asking what CMS is?

CMS stands for Content Management System. It is basically a piece of software which you host/install on your server and only the owner of the site can access and see it and use it to write and upload blog but users/visitors of the site will only be able to see and read the blog and cannot write and edit the blog so, in basic terminology it is like MS Word which work online and only the owner have write access and visitors will only have read access.

sounds good for your use case?

But before making your choice, you should know more about it. The most popular CMS is WordPress; it is so popular that 45.8% of the web is built on it! That means that more than two out of every five websites use WordPress.

To use WordPress, you have to spend money💰. WordPress itself is free and open source software but you have to rent a server space where it is going to run and stay online. And it is the first trade off of using WordPress, not everyone starting out wants or has money to gamble on the prospect of a future passive income source.

Now let’s talk about the second trade-off; WordPress has a very poor track record in terms of security. Because it is live running software with a SQL database attached to it, it will be the top target on the radar of hackers and bots. Basically, it means your WordPress site needs regular maintenance.

These are only two big trade-offs with WordPress but because it makes life so much easier for non-techy people, it is the most popular choice.

Now let’s talk about other choices. What if you don’t have money💰 or you are a very security conscious person. Then the only option left is to host a static site. Because it’s a static site, it does not require a backend server to work with so, there is no server to hack and no database to leak! and there are lots of free options to choose from for hosting your static site.

The only problem with static sites is that one has to create the pages for the site, and it becomes challenging when you are making a blogging site where you have to publish new articles regularly, Which means one has to again create the same-looking page with different content. Nobody likes to write raw HTML and CSS. This is where static site generators come into the picture.

They allow you to focus only on writing blog content, and then they use your content file and layout file (design file) to generate web pages that you can simply host.

You only have to write your layout file once. This file describes how your site is going to look, and the best part is you don’t even have to write it; you can simply download the best-looking one from the internet.

Because your blogs are static sites:

  1. They gonna load fast
  2. You can host it on internet for free
  3. You can use any AD services on your blog without restriction to earn revenue.

and the trade-off of using a static site generator is:

  1. Manually uploading your generated page regularly.

Don’t worry about that single trade-off; I will give you the solution to it in the next article.

If all this sounds good for you, then we can proceed further in our adventure.

click here to read the Part 2 of the Hugo Series

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