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by tkainrad 2386 days ago
I recommend using a static site generator. It brings precisely the features you ask for:

  - easy SEO optimization, especially compared to SPA  
  - easy content management, GitOps  
  - fast, scales well  
  - free to host via various services (e.g. GitLab and GitHub)
Personally, I like Hugo. They have an amazing gallery of free templates: https://themes.gohugo.io/

You might enjoy my blog post on how I host my personal website for free with Hugo and GitLab Pages: https://tkainrad.dev/posts/using-hugo-gitlab-pages-and-cloud...

6 comments

I'd like to mention Zola[1], a fast static site generator in a single binary with everything built-in. It is a replacement, improvement to Hugo and is written in rust.

We are using Zola for two static sites.

[1] https://www.getzola.org

I use Hugo too but I suggest anyone pay attention since they can introduce breaking changes with minor versions. With v0.58.0 they broke lots of themes, including mine, so if you want to create a theme for it, or even use an existing one, remember that just a small update might break it.

This[0] is the issue that broke lots of themes. The fix was certainly an easy and small one but still a breaking change, and not the only one, in a minor version change; that should have been a major version change, if you want to use semver[1] as a convention you must respect it.

[0]: https://github.com/gohugoio/hugoThemes/issues/682 [1]: https://semver.org/

Hugo is great choice.

I host my hugo sites on Azure Blob Storage for few cents (literally) per month.

Thanks for this guide! I was able to follow it easily and hope to try it out soon.
For others interested, here is a list of flat file CMSs: https://github.com/ahadb/flat-file-cms
Is hugo appropriate for a reasonably technically competent non-programmer?
If you are happy with a given template and only want to make minor modifications (i.e. coloring, logos,...) it should still be a good choice. But the same goes also for e.g. Wordpress.