Building and Hosting a Website: Part 3 — Static Site Generators (Hugo) and GitHub Pages

The third way to create a website is a static site generator. The most well-known of them are Hugo, Jekyll and Astro. This method requires technical skills, but provides a fast, secure, and low-maintenance-cost website.

How a static site generator works

The generator takes content (usually in Markdown), layout templates, and files like images and styles, and builds ready-made HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files from them. The server serves them to the visitor as-is, without generating the page anew on every request like a CMS does. The finished site can be hosted on any hosting service, including free ones, such as GitHub Pages.

Advantages

• Speed. Pages are pre-built, so they load quickly. This matters for both visitors and search engines.
• Security. There is no database, server-side code, or plugins on the server—common attack vectors used to hack sites.
• Low cost. Static files barely tax the server, and free hosting is available for small sites.
• Version control. The site is stored in a Git repository: every change is recorded in the history, can be reverted, and makes collaboration easy.
• Ease of maintenance. No need to update a CMS, database, or plugins.

Drawbacks

• High entry barrier. You need to know how to use the command line, Git, and a text editor.
• No administrative panel. Content and settings are stored in text files, which is inconvenient for non-technical users.
• Limited interactivity. For comments, contact forms, and search you need third-party services (for example, Formspree for forms) or separate solutions.
• Difficulty for a team. If the site’s authors are not willing to learn Markdown and Git, the publishing workflow will need to be simplified for them.

Free hosting

• Hosting. GitHub Pages and GitLab Pages host static sites for free and allow connecting a custom domain. On GitHub Pages’ free tier it only works with public repositories; site size is limited to 1 GB, and bandwidth is roughly 100 GB per month. GitHub’s rules prohibit using Pages as free hosting for an online store or other site intended primarily for commercial transactions.
• Software. The generators themselves are open-source software.
• Themes. There are many free themes available for popular generators.

Required skills and difficulty

• Skills:
  • working with the command line;
  • basics of Git and working with GitHub or GitLab;
  • Markdown for writing content;
  • basic HTML and CSS knowledge for customizing a theme;
  • understanding of how the site is built and deployed.
• Difficulty — high for a beginner and moderate for a programmer, system administrator, or DevOps engineer. For an entrepreneur without technical background, this route will most likely seem too labor-intensive.

A static site generator is well suited for a blog, documentation, a personal website, or a landing page where speed, security, and low costs are important.