Completely agree on this for small websites!
I use "oldschool" HTML, CSS and simple PHP includes for stuff like navigation, footer, etc. It's easy to maintain and fast.
My workflow looks like this:
Buying template/theme at e.g. Wrapbootstrap.com and then moving reuseable stuff like navigation, breadcrumbs, footer into PHP snippets and include them.
Finally using mod_rewrite via .htaccess for nice links.
Deployment / syncing is done by a simple BASH script which uses rsync command.
I completely agree with this. You don't need a framework for a website at all - especially if it's a small one. Saying that, you can't go wrong with https://getbootstrap.com/
That is what I am doing now, but I was wondering about boiler plate code, most site have menu, pages, contact form and some of these basic elements, at which point it feel redundant to re-create each time.