A series of questions

support
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Here are my layperson’s thoughts a few months into using Hugo:

  1. Hugo can handle large builds (See example). But it will depend on how you plan and optimize your site. In recent times, the maintainer has introduced new build commands such as --renderToDisk and --renderStaticToDisk which use less RAM. More so, something like partialCached can help. (You might also need more computer resources as the site grows such as processor and RAM). After all, Hugo’s m’motto’ being the “fastest SSG in the world” is tested and proven.
  2. You can folk a theme if it is abandoned and maintain it yourself with new Hugo features. Or even pay someone to develop a custom built one from scratch or even rewrite the folk. But, just as I advise those using WP, it is better to choose one theme and then stick with it. In fact, I would advise you to just have someone port your current look to Hugo (it is not that hard per se).
  3. If you are willing to spend money, then Menca is a good theme. It is also used by Hugo founder on his site. Or follow my idea and have your current theme ported over to Hugo.
  4. You can be creative and use PHP, but the search box in the forum can help with some of this.
  5. As somene says, “For me, SEO is good quality content, clean and valid HTML and some minimal set of meta tags. Your theme [should do the] job in this regard and the content is up to you.” So, if you have good content and the theme you use has clean/valid HTML, the meta tags you can insert using a guide. (I was using The SEO Framework before switching to SSGs and I copied the meta tags it was generating for every area of the website (CTRL+U to view the source code) and then ported that over to (first Jekyll then my) Hugo site. I mean the homepage, category pages, single posts, pages and taxonomies (categories and tags), etc.).
  6. Hugo at its core is GDPR compliant. It is up to you to make sure what you add on top of it is also compliant. Google search and the forum search box can help with that.
  7. Placing the ads script in the head section (between <head></head> and then you can use partials if you want the ads in templates, or shortcodes if you want the ads to appear inline with the content.

You can also leverage CMSes like Netlify, Forestly or CloudCannon to make your writing easier and for your writers who might not be familiar with markdown.

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