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Using a static site generator at scale

over 4 years ago from Cameron Getty

  • Marc EdwardsMarc Edwards, over 4 years ago

    If you want a static site generator that handles tons of pages, Hugo is an amazing option. Our site isn’t that big, but here’s some stats for you: 273 pages, 1211 static files, total build time of 1545 ms. Yep, the entire site is generated in less than 2 seconds. Hugo is phenomenally quick.

    Smashing Magazine is built using Hugo, too. They’ve published 2137 articles. Note that Hugo is also generating pages for tags and other things as well, so their total pages is probably way higher. I believe they were using WordPress prior to Hugo.

    What’s best? I personally love Hugo, and the concepts behind static site generators, but honestly, WordPress, Ghost, Jekyll, Middleman, or many of the other options can work well. Even though Hugo is incredibly fast, I don’t think build time should be the deciding factor — there’s many ways to automate builds, and if you’re going to place a CDN in front, then you’d have to factor in time for it to propagate anyway.

    10 points
    • Joe Blau, over 4 years ago

      Another vote for Hugo. I had a static site that I use to run that hosted all of the git documentation[1]. After bootstrapping the site had over 24,000 pages which finished compiling on my iMac in under a minute. Jekyll was so bad that it ran for a day before I killed the job because it never finished.

      [1] - https://github.com/dvcs/gitdvcs.com

      1 point
      • Marc EdwardsMarc Edwards, over 4 years ago

        Whoa. Great to hear it can churn through 24,000 pages without an issue. I wonder if there’s a way to get it to do partial builds, too? Not that it matters when it’s so quick, but it could be handy for some projects.

        Hugo Server does partial updates… I wonder if there’s a way to hook into that?

        0 points