After years on Drupal, I’ve moved my personal site to Hugo. Here’s why.
The Problem with Drupal for a Personal Site
Drupal is a powerful CMS — genuinely impressive for large content-managed sites. But for a personal portfolio with a handful of pages and occasional blog posts, it’s overkill. Security updates, PHP version management, database backups, caching configuration… the maintenance overhead is real.
Why Hugo
Hugo generates plain HTML. No PHP, no database, no runtime dependencies. The output is just files — FTP them to any web host and you’re done.
A few things I love:
- Speed. Builds in under a second even with hundreds of pages.
- Multilingual support. Built-in. No plugins, no hacks.
- Markdown content. Easy for humans and AI tools to write and update.
- Longevity. Even if Hugo is abandoned tomorrow, the generated HTML still works.
The AI Angle
One underrated benefit: because content is plain Markdown files, I can ask Claude
to draft new posts or translate existing ones. The AI reads the file, writes a
translation, and I run hugo to rebuild. No CMS admin panel required.
This site is the result. Simple, fast, and easy to maintain.