From WordPress to Hugo: My Setup Explained

Ten years of WordPress taught me enough to know when to leave. You start tweaking PHP configs, switching to LiteSpeed, juggling plugin updates — and for what? A blog. WordPress makes sense for e-commerce maybe, but for a simple content site it’s just overhead. Every plugin is another attack surface, and the DB adds a bottleneck you don’t need.

The alternative was also just more interesting to run. A git push triggers a build, Cloudflare Pages deploys it globally, everything is version-controlled and auditable. Writing a post is a markdown file in a repo. That’s a more satisfying way to operate a website if you spend your days in a terminal anyway.

Known vulnerabilities tracked at wpscan.com.

Hugo

merox.dev has been running on Hugo for over six months. Static files, no backend, free hosting on GitHub Pages, everything version-controlled. Hugo is written in Go so builds are fast, and the output is clean enough that SEO scores came in above 80% without any extra work.

I went with the Blowfish theme. To track upstream updates without breaking my customizations, I forked it and added it as a submodule:

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

The only real downside to Hugo is that you need to be comfortable in a terminal and working with Markdown. There’s no dashboard.

GitHub Pages + Cloudflare

1. Push Hugo project to a private repo
2. Enable GitHub Pages on a public repo (branch: gh-pages, folder: /)
3. In Cloudflare, add a CNAME for www.yourdomain.com → yourusername.github.io and A records for GitHub Pages IPs if needed
4. Add a CNAME file to your repo:

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merox.dev

Automated Deploys with GitHub Actions

My workflow: edit in VS Code → push to private repo → GitHub Actions builds and deploys to the public repo.

Private → Public Deploy via RSA

Since I keep the source in a private repo, I wire the two together with an SSH deploy key:

1. Generate the key pair:

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

2. Public repo: Settings → Deploy Keys → add deploy_key.pub with write access

3. Private repo: Settings → Secrets → add PRIVATE_KEY with the private key contents

4. .github/workflows/deploy.yml:

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name: github pages
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on:
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  push:
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    branches:
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      - master
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permissions:
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  contents: write
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  id-token: write
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jobs:
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  deploy:
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    runs-on: ubuntu-22.04
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    steps:
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      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
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        with:
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          submodules: true
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          fetch-depth: 0
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      - name: Setup Hugo
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        uses: peaceiris/actions-hugo@v3
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        with:
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          hugo-version: 'latest'
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          extended: true
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      - name: Build
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        run: hugo --minify
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      - name: Deploy
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        uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3
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        with:
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          deploy_key: ${{ secrets.PRIVATE_KEY }}
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          external_repository: meroxdotdev/merox.dev
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          publish_branch: gh-pages
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          publish_dir: ./public

SEO Results

No extra configuration — Hugo’s clean output just scores well out of the box.

From freetools.seobility.net and seositecheckup.com