Why I Switched to Hugo from a Hand-Coded Website

When I first started building my website, I hand-coded every HTML page (I still host some of pages here and here). Hand-coding gave me complete control over every detail—the image placement, the custom divs, and how things linked together. Early on, this process was straightforward and even satisfying in a control-freak sort of way. But as the site grew, so did the headaches. Managing and maintaining everything by hand became tedious, inefficient, and very retarded. Looking back, I can see how switching to a tool like Hugo earlier would have saved me a lot of time and unnecessary frustration.

At first, hand-coding seemed fine. The site was small, the updates were manageable, and I didn’t have many features to worry about. But as I added more pages and started thinking about improving functionality, things began to spiral. Every new page meant copying an existing HTML file, updating content, and manually editing navigation menus across the entire site. This repetitive process quickly became a chore, and small updates often introduced inconsistencies. A typo or forgotten link could create problems that took too much time to fix.

Keeping the design consistent became another challenge. If I wanted to tweak the layout—something as simple as adjusting the footer or reorganizing navigation—I had to go into every page and make the same change. What should have been a small update turned into hours of manual work. The larger the site became, the harder it was to ensure everything stayed uniform.

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