I really tried hugo, but I gave up because of hugo's many annoyances --- breaking changes in versions a mere few months apart (why????), yet another arbitrary templating system, poor support for org-mode out of the box, lots of impedance mismatch with ox-hugo (a valiant effort), runs a local server for local development, injects javascript for live refresh, etc...

Don't get me wrong, it is a really nice project which I do recommend to people who don't want to go down the path of writing their own custom site maker... The single-binary formula allows hugo to offer a much better set of trade-offs than the competition.

But... if you can write your own, write your own. It is a glorious yak shave.

My only tip will be to avoid all dependencies like the plague. For stability and sanity.

The upshot... After over two years of using my dinky-ass handmade pandoc-usin' (not even parallelised) static site maker, I feel hugo is not even as fast as what I have.