Hi everyone, I’m managing a content-based website that focuses on restaurant guides and menus — especially for places like Texas Roadhouse. The site is built using Hugo, and it’s been running smoothly for months. However, after updating my theme and adding some new shortcodes, I started experiencing a few issues during the build process that I can’t seem to resolve. The local build works most of the time, but deploying it or rebuilding on another machine causes errors and broken layouts.
The first problem I’m seeing is that Hugo sometimes fails to process certain Markdown files that use my custom shortcodes. The error message says: error calling partial: partial "menu-item.html" not found, even though the partial exists in the correct folder under layouts/partials/. What’s strange is that the build works perfectly on my laptop, but fails on my CI server and another PC. I tried clearing the /resources and /public directories before building, but it didn’t help.
Another issue is that some of my pages that use .Site.Params values (like restaurant categories and special offers) aren’t rendering the parameters correctly after the update. The theme used to pick up values from my config.toml, but now it returns blanks or the default placeholder text. I even tried converting the config file to YAML format to see if it was a parsing problem, but the issue persists. Could this be a caching issue or a theme variable naming mismatch from the update?
I also noticed that Hugo’s build time has increased dramatically. It used to complete in about 1–2 seconds, but now it takes 15–20 seconds or more, even for small content changes. The console shows a lot of “rebuilding page” messages, even when I’m only editing one Markdown file. I tried disabling asset minification and running hugo --gc --minify, but it didn’t make much difference. Is there a known performance regression in the latest Hugo version, or could my theme’s new partials be too heavy?
Additionally, the images on my website (especially those on the Texas Roadhouse pages) are not being optimized correctly anymore. I use Hugo’s built-in image processing to resize and compress them, but now some of the processed images fail to appear on the live site. The logs show “failed to copy image” errors occasionally. I verified that the paths are correct and the images exist in the /static directory. Could this be related to the new resource handling in Hugo’s recent updates?
Has anyone else faced similar issues after updating a Hugo theme or switching build environments? I’d really appreciate advice on how to debug theme compatibility problems and inconsistent rendering. I love how fast Hugo is normally, but these recent build and rendering issues have made deployment unreliable. Any help or suggestions would mean a lot — I’m hoping to get my restaurant site back to its usual performance soon. Sorry for the long post.
Thanks for jumping in! I’m currently running Hugo v0.129.0 locally (extended version), and my CI environment is using v0.128.2 I just realized there’s a version mismatch between the two. Could that difference alone cause the partials and .Site.Params issues I’m seeing?
Also, if it helps, the theme I’m using was recently updated to better support the latest Hugo features. My website focuses on restaurant-related content (like Texas Roadhouse menus and guides), so I rely heavily on custom shortcodes and image processing. I can try matching the Hugo versions between local and remote if that’s likely to fix the inconsistencies.