Migrated Website to Hugo

Over the past week I migrated my blog from using static site generator, Jekyll to use Hugo. I also switched hosts from Github Pages to Netlify.

The main reasons for the changes are:

• Jekyll/Ruby is just too slow as a static site generator in development/production.
• Hugo/Go is fast.
• Wanted to try out Netlify.

When I wrote new posts with Jekyll, it was painfully slow to build the site after any small set of changes. With Hugo, it’s really fast. I can pretty much hit command+S, to save all the time and have the page refresh right away.

Overall the project migration went pretty smoothly thanks to some migration tools. I specifically used ConvertToHugo.

Some of the challenges I came across were:

• Updating some front matter for pages and posts.
• Find/replace certain strings to improve site as well as front matter.
• Migrating some Ruby syntax to Go (Hugo).
• Figuring out Hugo scopes.
• Learning how to create/use a theme.
• Getting atom feed to work.

I tried out Netlify for the first time and love it. Their tools and interface was very intuitive for building and deploying was pretty straightforward. I also love how easy it was to set up HTTPS (Let’s Encrypt) wit them. And like Github Pages, it’s all free since I currently have no need for the paid features. I look forward to migrating a few other small projects over.