Experience with Hugo + Cloudflare Pages

I’m a JavaScript (mostly TypeScript now) developer and therefore the first (and previous) version of my blog was built with the MERN stack.

HUGO, as the page says, is not an average static site generator. I first heard of it while watching Fireship’s video on it.

I tried Jekyll locally but didn’t like it. I chose Hugo because of how simple it is to use. Following the Quick Start Guide is super simple & straightforward.

Cloudflare Pages is an amazing service for deploying static sites. It integrates easily with GitHub. Plus, you can easily set it up to rebuild & deploy at every push. I was introduced to this service by a close friend who is also a massive Cloudflare fan.

Those days I was looking for ways to quickly make my blog;

faster,
serverless and
more SEO-friendly.

Why not NextJS?

Now I would’ve loved to and wanted to go with NextJS but I honestly did not have the time to code a blog. I had more interesting (and obv paid) tasks to complete and am still quite busy.

BTW, if you’re looking for fast, serverless, and scalable stuff with NextJS, I recommend getting started with create.t3.gg.

Why is HUGO good?

It saved me valuable time and got the job done.
It has a good number of themes to choose from.
Powered by Go, it’s really really fast.

Why Cloudflare pages are good?

Free, it’s amazing what Cloudflare as a company is offering.
Easy to get started and integrate with.
Great loading times and overall performance.
Auto builds and deployment on pushes.

Conclusion

Now I simply write & edit .md files and push them to the GitHub repo.

I know the design isn’t exactly how I would’ve liked it and my friends have complained how the ReactJS version had a better design.