Which static site generator should you choose for your website

Here we will talk about choosing a proper static site generator for a static website (web apps are not covered). You can find a list of generators at StaticGen. But there are so many of them, Static Site Generators Reviewed has narrowed the range to four typical ones: Jekyll, Middleman, Roots and Hugo. Below gives a simple conclusion about them.

Jekyll and Middleman are two old generators. If you are familiar with Ruby, then they can get into your choice list. Compared to Jeklly, Middleman fits more for large websites and it allows the extensions to hook into it through API.

Roots comes from the nodejs-based world which means it is friendly to front-end developers . It is created by a group named Carrot. If you build websites with Carrot’s standard toolchain, it will be highly convenient.

If you pursue fast speed (which is important especially when your website grows up), Hugo is absolutely your best choice. It is written in Go which means it is a statically complied binary. Therefore there are not extensions. However it provides powerful content model for you to build custom content. You can call some functions in the templates. And you can even get content from local data files or dynamic sources on remote. Hugo is very easy to get started for no dependency is required.

If you are still not sure which one to use, just try Hugo.