Building SolveBeam With Hugo

As a WordPress developer at Pronamic, WordPress is usually my go-to platform for building websites. But I’m always curious about other technologies. In recent years, static site generators (SSGs) like Hugo, Next.js, and Gatsby have gained a lot of traction—for good reason. Static sites load incredibly fast, are more secure, scale easily, and often come with low or even zero hosting costs.

That doesn’t mean you have to leave WordPress behind entirely. Solutions like Simply Static by Patrick Posner make it possible to generate a static version of a WordPress site. This can be a great solution for blogs or documentation sites that don’t require dynamic functionality. In his video “Make WordPress Static on Cloudflare Pages”, Remkus de Vries demonstrates how to set this up in practice.

For SolveBeam.com, I decided to step out of my comfort zone and experiment with a purely static site generator: Hugo. After some research, I chose the Hugoplate theme by Zeon Studio in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Hugo’s speed and simple configuration made the transition smooth, and Hugoplate provided the clean, modern setup I was looking for. Working with Markdown and seeing Hugo generate pages almost instantly was a refreshing experience.

Key Takeaway

Static sites are a powerful alternative, but the right choice depends on the project. WordPress remains the best option for dynamic content, while SSGs like Hugo shine for fast, lightweight websites without server dependencies.

For SolveBeam, Hugo has been a great choice so far, but I expect to transition to WordPress in the near future. The need for features like comments and forms—especially with Gravity Forms—makes WordPress the more practical long-term solution. I’ll continue to follow both technologies and see how they evolve!

References

1. “Published my tutorial on how to turn WordPress into a static site with Simply Static and deploy it to Cloudflare Pages on YouTube”. Retrieved 17 April 2024 – via X.