Guidance on migrating my site to the latest version of hugo

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My site scottRlarson.com has been running Hugo version 0.43.3 for awhile now. In 2021 I was suppose to upgrade my site but it never happened.

My site is currently hosted with Netlify. Recently they retired their Build Image from “Focal” to “Noble” and im having some problems getting my site to build and relaized that its time I spent some time on brainstorming a strategy for upgrading.

My original idea that I posted about in 2021 was to upgrade hugo latest version using a different branch along with trying to get two versions of hugo 0.43.3 and latest working on my system. This would allow me to continue working with current version of my site along with testing and fixing problems as they come up with the upgrade.

Because I am using a theme from that era, I thought maybe the best way to deal with this is to create a new instance of a hugo site with a different theme I can customize in a docker or some isolated environment with the latest version of Hugo, create new markdown files and manual port just the content from the 0.43 instance markdown files into new files on the new site.

That might be easier then trying to fix the problems thats going to come up between the versions. I only have about 300 public facing web pages.. That would take a me a few days to migrate to individual files.

What would you do in this instance?

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I would make a copy of the current site, and run the latest Hugo binary against it, see what it breaks. I would then fix each issue (checking documentation and coming here if running into deadends) until it works.

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3

Porting content is actually the better way. You can browse the Hugo theme section for a theme to start with. Pick any that supports Hugo version 0.146.0 as minimum.

Install GitHub - jmooring/hvm: Hugo Version Manager · GitHub if you want to see how different versions of Hugo affect your site.

A lot has happened since version 0.43. Hugo moved to a new markdown renderer, markdown render hooks were introduced, new layout system, etc. So check carefully if each markdown page is rendered as it should. I would suggest you have an AI service like Claude or Gemini to help you troubleshoot small issues, since it can help you avoid asking a lot of support questions here.

4

If you have access to an AI tool (e.g. Google Gemini, Claude Code or similar) I would recommend give that a try.

I created this tool for myself to upgrade my themes/sites to the latest Hugo syntax, and it has worked great for me:

I’m not sure how it works for very old sityes, but AI tools have improved a lot in just the last few months.

Note that I don’t think you need the tool above for the common case. Here’s what I would do:

  • Google Gemini has a generous free offerings, so intall Gemini CLI.
  • Install the latest Hugo version on my PC.
  • Start gemini in my old site’s directory.
  • Tell gemini to migrate the site to modern Hugo syntax and then verify by running hugo and make sure that it looks good.
5

Upgrading from **Hugo 0.43 → latest is a pretty big jump, so I wouldn’t manually recreate 300 pages, that’s a lot of unnecessary work. Your markdown content should migrate fine as-is.

What I usually do for older projects like this:

• Keep the current site building with 0.43.3
• Create a separate branch using the latest Hugo
• Upgrade/refactor the theme and templates only
• Fix breaking changes (config structure, template funcs, Pipes/SCSS, deprecated methods, etc.)
• Update the Netlify build image + config
• Test both builds side-by-side until parity, then switch

In most cases the “pain” is 90% theme/layout compatibility, not content migration.

If you want a faster path and don’t feel like wrestling with the upgrade yourself, I’ve done several legacy Hugo → modern migrations and would be happy to help professionally, feel free to DM me.