I’m sick of Wordpress and all the issues of keeping it updated. Now to get started making static sites. Anyone have any recommendations where to begin? I have several client websites that need some sort of CMS to update a page from the front end to list their dogs or horses for sale. All other pages just will be static. If anyone can advise to what I need to use or look for to begin this new journey I’d appreciate it very much!
Welcome!
There’s a couple of great CMS’s which work well with Hugo. I recommend having a look at Forestry and Netlify CMS. I’m pretty sure you could set things up so clients can have a fairly straight forward interface for updating pages.
Netlify CMS is not well suited if you are coming from WordPress. I did not play around with Forestry yet to know if it is. That’s all the experience I can contribute in that area. But I successfully transferred plenty of websites from WordPress to Hugo. If you can teach your clients to understand MarkDown then you can do that without a CMS in the end.
Depending on your client websites I would take the smallest one and just start re-creating it. Once you have a working Hugo version of your site you start looking into CMS options. The Wordpress to Hugo plugins and methods I found all export to single md-files for wordpress pages and posts. I very much prefer page bundles though because you can have everything (images, PDF downloads, etc.) in one folder per page/post.
Another thing is: a page in Hugo is not a page in WordPress. Take a weekend and read the whole documentation once. WordPress lingo tends to dirty up help requests 
I switched from WordPress about 2.5years ago (that’s what discourse is telling me, it feels longer) and will tell everyone asking that I can transform their WordPress site into a Hugo site easily. So the main investment is time.
If you have specific questions then open a post here on discourse and we go from there. Having a test-case in a publicly available git-repository always helps.
I repeat: Read the full documentation at least once. There are many hidden things that won’t become clear from just following the quick start documentation.
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thanks for your input. I will definitely dive into this as soon as I find time. It means a lot to actually hear from previous Wordpress users.
Thanks for the CMS recommendations. I’ll definitely look into those you mentioned. Wish me luck!
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Hugo documentation is cryptic and often unhelpful. You really just have to do and learn. I found more solutions here and on stack exchange or on blog pages.
If you’re a newbie about static site generators, the youtube video series by Mike Dane is really useful.
Then pick a template you like from the templates page, and stick with it for a while. Customizing templates is bit tricky at first. So try to figure one out completely before rushing onto the next thing.
I’m still on my first template and I’m about 2 months in working with Hugo.