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Using a static site generator at scale

4 years ago from Cameron Getty

  • Matthew BlodeMatthew Blode, 4 years ago

    Jekyll is pretty great but if there are a ton of articles or posts, Hugo (https://gohugo.io/) is much more performant than Jekyll which uses Ruby instead of Go.

    Alternatively, you should definitely look into Craft CMS (https://craftcms.com/) which is incredible for managing content and is extremely flexible. I've helped to build Craft sites that were deployed to 1 million unique users per month with 100s of pages of content. It is a far better developer and authoring experience than Wordpress.

    Static site generators are great and lightning fast, however, the author needs to have some knowledge with markdown or coding to deploy content and it can be a slower, less flexible setup than using a CMS.

    2 points
    • Dan WilkinsonDan Wilkinson, 4 years ago

      +1 here for Craft CMS.

      1 point
    • Mike Wilson, 4 years ago

      Your last point is very important.

      My advice to OP would be to not fall into the trap of the latest shiny object. Gatsby/Hugo + Netlify is definitely an awesome setup for something like a portfolio or a brochure site that doesn't get updated frequently. Continuous deployment from Git to Netlify is a dream.

      HOWEVER, for an editorial site being updated daily, having a workflow where you can update via logging into a CMS with robust SEO features is going to be far more important. Netlify CMS (which you can attach to Hugo, etc) is just okay, and doesn't offer enough features out of the box.

      If I was OP I'd go flat file CMS like Statamic or Kirby, or if you're not well versed in front-end development, gasp Wordpress. Wordpress, while bloated and generally terrible to work with, has plugins to handle every possible scenario an editorial site will encounter. Setting it up at first will suck, but the writing experience will be a much faster workflow.

      1 point