---
title: What is Hugo
linktitle: What is Hugo
description: Hugo is a fast and modern static site generator written in Go, and designed to make website creation fun again.
date: 2017-02-01
publishdate: 2017-02-01
lastmod: 2017-02-01
layout: single
menu:
  docs:
    parent: "about"
    weight: 10
weight: 10
sections_weight: 10
draft: false
aliases: [/overview/introduction/,/about/why-i-built-hugo/]
toc: true
---

Hugo is a general-purpose website framework. Technically speaking, Hugo is a [static site generator][]. Unlike systems that dynamically build a page with each visitor request, Hugo builds pages when you create or update your content. Since websites are viewed far more often than they are edited, Hugo is designed to provide an optimal viewing experience for your website's end users and an ideal writing experience for website authors.

Websites built with Hugo are extremely fast and secure. Hugo sites can be hosted anywhere, including [Netlify][], [Heroku][], [GoDaddy][], [DreamHost][], [GitHub Pages][], [GitLab Pages][], [Surge][], [Aerobatic][], [Firebase][], [Google Cloud Storage][], [Amazon S3][], [Rackspace][], [Azure][], and [CloudFront][] and work well with CDNs. Hugo sites run without the need for a database or dependencies on expensive runtimes like Ruby, Python, or PHP.

We think of Hugo as the ideal website creation tool with nearly instant build times, able to rebuild whenever a change is made.

## How Fast is Hugo?

{{< youtube "CdiDYZ51a2o" >}}

## What Does Hugo Do?

In technical terms, Hugo takes a source directory of files and templates and uses these as input to create a complete website.

## Who Should Use Hugo?

Hugo is for people that prefer writing in a text editor over a browser.

Hugo is for people who want to hand code their own website without worrying about setting up complicated runtimes, dependencies and databases.

Hugo is for people building a blog, a company site, a portfolio site, documentation, a single landing page, or a website with thousands of pages.

[@spf13]: https://twitter.com/spf13
[Aerobatic]: https://www.aerobatic.com/
[Amazon S3]: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/
[Azure]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/storage-blob-static-website
[CloudFront]: https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/ "Amazon CloudFront"
[DreamHost]: https://www.dreamhost.com/
[Firebase]: https://firebase.google.com/docs/hosting/ "Firebase static hosting"
[GitHub Pages]: https://pages.github.com/
[GitLab Pages]: https://about.gitlab.com/features/pages/
[Go language]: https://golang.org/
[GoDaddy]: https://www.godaddy.com/ "GoDaddy.com Hosting"
[Google Cloud Storage]: https://cloud.google.com/storage/
[Heroku]: https://www.heroku.com/
[Jekyll]: https://jekyllrb.com/
[Middleman]: https://middlemanapp.com/
[Nanoc]: https://nanoc.ws/
[Netlify]: https://netlify.com
[Rackspace]: https://www.rackspace.com/cloud/files
[Surge]: https://surge.sh
[contributing to it]: https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo
[rackspace]: https://www.rackspace.com/openstack/public/files
[static site generator]: /about/benefits/
