Hugo

Hugo builds static sites faster than anything else. We're talking thousands of pages in seconds, not minutes. Written in Go with a single binary distribution — no Ruby gems, no Node modules, no dependency hell. It's been the speed king of static site generators for years.

Eleventy is the Node.js alternative with more templating flexibility. Astro is the modern framework that mixes static and dynamic. Jekyll is the OG that GitHub Pages made famous (and slow). Next.js is overkill if you just need static output.

If you're building a blog, documentation site, or marketing page with hundreds of pages, Hugo is your fastest option. The content management through Markdown and front matter is straightforward. Themes are plentiful.

The catch: Go templating syntax is its own special kind of pain. {{ with .Params.author }}{{ . }}{{ end }} reads like someone lost a fight with curly braces. The learning curve is steeper than Eleventy or Astro for anything beyond basic content. And if you need dynamic interactivity, you'll bolt on JavaScript frameworks anyway.