If you want something that just works for years and years, static sites are fantastic for that. Hugo is what I use for my astrophotography blog and it's blazing fast and...well...static
If you want something that just works for years and years, static sites are fantastic for that. Hugo is what I use for my astrophotography blog and it's blazing fast and...well...static
It's not about what I (as a web dev) need, but what works for "halp, I need a website" clients who don't know anything about tech. Hugo still implies the need for a build setup and hosting, which in turn means DNS, SSL, CLI, etc. Which often means more dev time. Your average yoga teacher or restaurant or nonprofit would have no idea how to deal with all that (and they shouldn't have to). That's why the page builders are better for them, IMO.
I recently moved two sites from GoDaddy's predatory WordPress offering (they were charging $1k a year just for some security add-on) to use Hugo + DecapCMS + AWS Amplify. Decap is a fantastic "good enough" CMS to do anything clients of this size need, the only downside is it takes about 1 minute to deploy any changes. Amplify let's you lock a version of Hugo to use, or bring your own, and it will build and deploy your site on any new commit if your repo is in Github or Gitlab. Both clients are currently billed $0.51 per month, and the only reason it is that high is because Route53 costs $0.50 per month per hosted zone. So both these clients went from paying nearly $3k each year for a WordPress site to paying just over $6 a year for a site with nearly the same functionality and none of the maintenance or security concerns. And once everything is all set up, which honestly is not that hard, the only "tech" they need to know is how to sign into Gitlab, which are the credentials they use to log into their Decap admin.
At some point you'll want to upgrade the hugo generator, and then you'll need to wade through their release logs. I neglected my personal site for years and I had to hunt down various errors and deprecations. It's out of reach for non-developers to do. A 1.x compatibility promise would go a long way.
My wife's site runs on Squarespace, and she's been self-sufficient since it was set up.
I used to run my personal website on Hugo but after a few years I wanted to upgrade the Hugo version and was suddenly out in the cold - there was no real path to upgrade, everything only works together once and as soon as I started upgrading, there was mismatch between the generator, the theme, and whatever widgets I used.
Moved to wordpress.com since that. No more worry about keeping things working, I can focus on the content. Admittedly, the horrible load times of wordpress.com sites are causing me to look at alternatives - waiting 5 seconds for the homepage to show up is not really acceptable.
I wish someone made a hosted version of a static site generator - they maintain the compatibility between individual components, provide some online editor for content, but the output is just a bunch of static files generated from this. Have not found one so far but if you know one, please drop a line!