I am currently developing a restaurant menu website using Hugo as the static site generator. The website includes multiple categories, detailed item descriptions, pricing, images, and promotional content, all of which are dynamically generated from markdown files and data files. One major challenge I’m facing is maintaining consistent rendering across pages and categories. While pages render perfectly in the Hugo server during local development, I occasionally encounter missing sections or partial content after building and deploying the site. Entire categories sometimes fail to appear, or certain items are missing until the browser cache is refreshed. This makes it difficult to ensure the live site accurately reflects the structured content I maintain in markdown and data files.
Another challenge involves organizing complex content structures. Each menu category has multiple items with attributes such as pricing, ingredients, dietary tags, and availability. I am using a combination of content folders, front matter metadata, and data files, but as the menu grows, Hugo’s build times increase, and some dynamic list generation slows or produces incomplete output. I am unsure whether this is caused by excessive nested loops, inefficient template logic, or limitations in how Hugo handles large datasets. Guidance on structuring complex, multi-attribute content efficiently in Hugo would be extremely helpful.
Images and media assets present additional difficulties. Each menu item includes high-resolution images for both desktop and mobile layouts. While Hugo’s built-in image processing helps with resizing and optimization, I still encounter layout shifts, delayed loading, or missing images, particularly when multiple images are referenced from different data files. Lazy loading partially mitigates this issue, but sometimes it causes images to load incorrectly or in the wrong order, affecting the visual consistency of the menu. I would appreciate best practices for managing media-heavy, static content in Hugo while maintaining responsiveness and fast page loads.
Filtering and interactivity add another layer of complexity. Users should be able to filter items by category, dietary preferences, or promotional offers. Since Hugo generates static pages, I have implemented client-side JavaScript to handle dynamic filtering. However, when multiple filters are applied simultaneously, items occasionally disappear or remain visible despite not matching the criteria. I suspect this may be related to the way Hugo renders data into HTML and how JavaScript interacts with it, but I am unsure of the most reliable approach for combining static site generation with dynamic client-side interactivity.
Content updates and workflow are also a concern. Menu items, promotions, and pricing are frequently updated, and multiple team members contribute changes to markdown and data files. Occasionally, recent edits do not appear in the live build, or older versions override newer updates after deploying. This raises questions about proper Git workflows, caching, and incremental builds in Hugo. I would like recommendations for best practices in collaborative editing and build automation to ensure accurate, consistent content deployment for a frequently updated menu site.
Finally, I am planning to scale this website to support multiple locations, each with its own menu, pricing, and promotional content. This increases the complexity of content organization, template logic, and build performance. I want to ensure that the site remains fast, responsive, and easy to maintain even as the dataset grows, without introducing brittle templates or excessively long build times. Insights from the Hugo community on efficiently managing large, dynamic content sets, optimizing templates, and integrating client-side interactivity on a static site would be extremely valuable. Sorry for long
