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

25.05.2025

We’ve already covered website builders for a quick start and CMS platforms for maximum flexibility. Now it’s time to look at the third approach — static site generators, such as Hugo, Jekyll, and Gatsby. This method requires more technical knowledge but offers exceptional performance, security, and cost advantages.

Static Site Generators: Speed, Security, and Cost Efficiency

A static site generator is a tool that takes your content (usually written in Markdown), pre-made templates, and assets (images, styles), and compiles them into a set of plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. These files are “static” — meaning they don’t need to be processed by a server on every page request like CMS platforms do. The final output can be hosted on virtually any server — including free services like GitHub Pages.