[misterxi]

Pelican and Jekyll - Optimising the output is bit hard because most of the tools for that exist in the JS ecosystem. If you are not that concerned about stuff like inlining critical CSS, image optimisation, CSS and JS traspilation, these could be good choices.

Hugo - Pretty much the same issues with Jekyll and Pelican, and the templating language also leaves a lot to be desired. If build speed is paramount to you, choose this.

11ty - I just benchmarked lego against this and it looks like there is only a couple ms difference performance wise. The only real difference is that 11ty lets the users configure everything and decide what kind of optimisations they want(or if at all they want it).

lego supports the templating languages of both Pelican and Jekyll and is reasonably fast as well. It also optimises the output build as much as possible. If at all you decide to use it, please share your feedback.

Another important factor, in your case, might be the availability of templates. Pelican, Hugo and Jekyll should have readymade templates for most use cases and should save you time spent on designing the layouts, writing CSS, etc. I am not sure if 11ty has such an ecosystem. lego definitely doesn't have any templates and you might want to factor that in your decision.

I hope this answers your question. Also, all the best with your dissertation :)

[qmmmur]

Thanks for your response. As you alluded to, I found a theme for Hugo that worked out of the box for what I needed (essentially a book format). I don't need much customisation on the layout and my main focus is reducing development time implementing different kinds of content in an easy to structure manner.