From WordPress to Hugo: My Setup Explained

Ten years ago, I started my first website projects—some for myself, others for friends or clients. I spent a lot of time experimenting with themes, plugins, and WordPress setups. Some of the projects I dedicated the most effort to are listed here: https://merox.dev/websites/

🧱 My Experience with WordPress
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WordPress is a solid way to get started—especially if you’re messing around with your first LAMP server. But long term? It can be a pain. You’ll find yourself tweaking PHP configs, switching to LiteSpeed, juggling plugin updates, and basically fine-tuning everything so it doesn’t fall apart.

✅ What I Liked
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Database-based structure
Huge plugin ecosystem
Easy integrations with third-party tools
Pretty smooth for non-devs thanks to the admin dashboard

❌ But Also…
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Every plugin is another potential vulnerability
Too many resources for something like a static website
Gets heavy fast (plugins + DB = bottleneck)
Needs constant updates and babysitting

From my perspective, if you just want a simple presentation website, WordPress is overkill. You’re burning CPU cycles and adding surface area for no real reason.

E-commerce? Maybe. WooCommerce is fine—until it isn’t. Do your research. Shopify is probably the better call long-term.

Here’s a visual from wpscan.com showing the current number of known vulnerabilities:

🌀 Moving to Hugo
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For over 6 months now, I’ve been all-in on Hugo—my current site merox.dev runs entirely on it. I had totally underestimated the power of a static site. Hugo’s written in Go, builds super fast, and is already SEO-optimized out of the box.

I chose Blowfish as the theme and tweaked it over time to fit my needs.

✅ Hugo Pros
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Static = zero backend vuln headaches
Hosting? Free, thanks to GitHub Pages
Markdown = clean, portable, fast to edit
Insanely fast loading
Version control with Git, so I always know what’s changing

❌ Hugo Cons
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You need to be a bit technical
No dashboard—everything’s in Markdown
Some DevOps skills help if you want a clean, automated setup

🧩 Setting Up Hugo + Blowfish
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Install Hugo: https://gohugo.io/installation/
Add Blowfish theme: https://blowfish.page/docs/installation/
Use blowfish-tools for live previews—it’s a nice touch

To keep the theme up to date without breaking my customizations, I forked Blowfish and added it as a Git submodule like this:

git submodule add https://github.com/YOURUSERNAME/blowfish themes/blowfish

This way, I can track upstream updates while maintaining my own style.

🌐 Connecting Domain via GitHub Pages + Cloudflare
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After installing Hugo + Blowfish, I decided to host my site using GitHub Pages and manage DNS via Cloudflare.

Here’s a quick guide:

Push Hugo project to a private repo
Enable GitHub Pages on a public repo (choose branch: gh-pages, folder: /)
In Cloudflare:
- Add a CNAME for www.yourdomain.com → yourusername.github.io
- Add A records pointing to GitHub Pages IPs if needed
Add a CNAME file in your repo containing:
```
merox.dev
```

Wait for DNS to propagate and you’re done.

⚙️ Automating Deploys with GitHub Actions
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I’m not about that manual deploy life. So I set up GitHub Actions to take care of builds and deploys whenever I push to master.

My workflow? Make changes in VS Code → push to private repo → GitHub Actions builds → deploys to public repo.

🔐 Connecting Private + Public Repo Using RSA
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I didn’t want my source repo to be public. So here’s how I did the private → public deploy using RSA keys:

SSH Deploy Setup
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Generate an RSA key pair:

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "github-deploy" -f deploy_key -N ""

Public repo (destination):
- Go to Settings → Deploy Keys → Add deploy_key.pub with write access
Private repo (source):
- Settings → Secrets → Add PRIVATE_KEY → paste the private key contents
My .github/workflows/deploy.yml:

 1name: github pages
 2
 3on:
 4  push:
 5    branches:
 6      - master
 7
 8permissions:
 9  contents: write
10  id-token: write
11
12jobs:
13  deploy:
14    runs-on: ubuntu-22.04
15    steps:
16      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
17        with:
18          submodules: true
19          fetch-depth: 0
20
21      - name: Setup Hugo
22        uses: peaceiris/actions-hugo@v3
23        with:
24          hugo-version: 'latest'
25          extended: true
26
27      - name: Build
28        run: hugo --minify
29
30      - name: Deploy
31        uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3
32        with:
33          deploy_key: ${{ secrets.PRIVATE_KEY }}
34          external_repository: mer0x/merox.dev
35          publish_branch: gh-pages
36          publish_dir: ./public

📈 SEO Results After the Switch
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I didn’t even have to do much SEO magic — Hugo just works. With clean structure and no bloat, I got over 80% SEO scores right away. That’s the beauty of static sites done right.

From https://freetools.seobility.net/

From https://seositecheckup.com/

💬 Final Thoughts
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No more updates every week. No plugin bugs. No servers to worry about. And I finally get a blazing-fast site, version-controlled, with everything set up exactly how I want.

If you’re into the idea of a static site and want help setting one up—or just have questions—drop me an email or comment. Happy to help.