Hugo is fast!

Published

October 11, 2024

One of the things I don’t like about Quarto is that it is slow to build web pages. Even a relatively small site involves a short wait whilst it builds. Another thing is that pages it generates tend to be quite heavy in terms of what they include, so don’t display as fast as they might. So I’ve been tempted recently to switch to one of the other static site generators.

I’ve been playing with Hugo, which is a very mature and popular static site generator. It is written in Go, and it’s so fast at generating web pages it’s practically instant. Which is very appealing. I’ve also been looking at Hugo templates, and despite there being a lot available, I haven’t been able to find one I like. So I think I’ll stick to Quarto for now, as it does pretty much everything I need.

Quarto pros

  • I am familiar with it.
  • It does pretty much everything I want and need.

Quarto cons

  • It’s slow.
  • It makes heavy pages.

Hugo pros

  • Super fast!
  • Easier to theme, lots of themes available.

Hugo cons

  • There is no theme that does everything that I want, so I would have to make my own theme.
  • There is (apparently) quite a lot to learn to create and modify themes.