I’ve been using HUGO for some time, but I’ve been unable to find out how to add a standard HTML page to my site. I have an HTML homepage named “index.html” in the layouts directory I’ve used for years. However, I don’t know how to create a new HTML page; I only know how to create new markdown pages.
The reason I want to create an HTML page is that I have several markdown pages, which simply call an HTML shortcode that makes up the entire page. I believe using HTML would be more ideal in this case. I also need to include partials, such as my header and footer, on these HTML pages.
you may just place a html file in your content directory
/content/posts/
-- page-1.md
-- page-2.html
this will be processed by your templates if you add a frontmatter header (can be empty)
---
title: My special html page
---
<p>{{< Ref "/tags" >}} A HTML file is just a text file containing html markup.</p>
with a standard hugo baseof.html that will create a HTML shell and directly add the paragraph.
Result
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en-US" dir="ltr">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">
<title>My special html page | My New Hugo Site</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/main.min.73be4799b2091d293b47b52ca2642fe82aa2b1c9c050e8d1b389a80939a30dd4.css" integrity="sha256-c75HmbIJHSk7R7UsomQv6CqiscnAUOjRs4moCTmjDdQ=" crossorigin="anonymous">
<script src="/js/main.23cd0c7d837263b9eaeb96ee2d9ccfa2969daa3fa00fa1c1fe8701a9b87251a1.js" integrity="sha256-I80MfYNyY7nq65buLZzPopadqj+gD6HB/ocBqbhyUaE=" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
</head>
<body>
<header>
<h1>My New Hugo Site</h1>
<nav>
<ul>
<li>
<a href="/">Home</a>
</li>
<li>
<a aria-current="true" class="ancestor" href="/posts/">Posts</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="/tags/">Tags</a>
</li>
</ul>
</nav>
</header>
<main>
<h1>My special html page</h1>
<time datetime="0001-01-01T00:00:00+00:00">January 1, 1</time>
<p>https://example.org/tags/ A HTML file is just a text file containing html markup.</p>
</main>
<footer>
<p>Copyright 2025. All rights reserved.</p>
</footer>
</body>
</html>
ofc you may create different layout files
you may not call partials from page-2.html directly cause it’s a content file. You will have to create a shortcode which is then calling the partial.
I would say yes it’s cleaner than putting the page into a shortcode. (in fact also just a part cause you said you want to generate header and footer) so you work with layouts already.
and more flexible, cause you can use shortcodes inside your html just like in markdown
markdown + shortcode ( html ) + markdown => layout to html page
vs
html | layout to html page
if these files are handmade you might consider to migrate them to markdown, aswell.
all that depends on your content organization, things you cannot or do not want to change by reason. So without real stuff hard to reason.
