Astro https://astro.build/

I love Astro. It is so extensive to your liking and if you want to have complex interactive stuff at some point, you can just add a framework of your liking (react, vue, svelte, etc) and it will still work wonders. It doesn't abstract that much, and yet provides a nice UX and performance is top notch, which is why I love it so much. You can do from the most simplest website and blog on it, to the most complex content driven websites. I use it for so many different things, both hobbyist and professionally.

I'm using tanstack+tailwind and Ai to write a few scripts for doing what static generators would do. Keep it simple, make it unique, bring back the weird

ai. like have them take your language of choice, your templating of choice, your architecture of choice etc and spit out something. they've seen enough that it can pretty much oneshot something relatively simple.

edit: i mean have the ai write the generator, don't use it to actually generate pages...

Astro is fantastic.

https://astro.build/

I use Hugo for one blog [1] and Zola for another [2], I think they're both pretty simple to use once you wrap your mind around how they structure things.

Astro is also great (as others have noted) esp if you want to leverage the JS ecosystem at large.

[1] https://frominsidethebox.com

[2] https://yakshed.com

I'm going to push back against Astro because all the server island stuff is over-engineered for a blog, while in the meantime Astro is not designed for more complex sites so I'm not sure what it's purpose is really.

I would say that in the era of agentic coding you don't need any framework. Just a backend + router + markdown generator. I use Hono + Tanstack router for the first two. Tell any decent LLM to wire those up for you and you'll have a simple static site ready to go in an hour or two.

I'm on Hugo. It's simple, capable, well documented, LLMs understand it well, and I don't have to touch the JS ecosystem. My previous setup was with a Node based SSG and it broke on literally every update and had a hundred dependencies.

I created a static blog framework called Amytis: https://github.com/hutusi/amytis and I'm really excited for you to give it a try.

So many great options. I always opt for Web Origami though.

It is more like a dialect of JavaScript optimised for developing static sites than a static site generator in and of itself. It has lots of 'builtins' for things like RSS and converting Markdown to HTML. It is so wonderfully flexible and doesn't lock you into a specific site structure like others SSGs do.

https://weborigami.org/

I love using hugo. Also wrote about some time ago how I got a perfect 100/100 Lighthouse score with Hugo and plain CSS. Feel free to have a look: https://philippdubach.com/posts/hugo-lighthouse-100/

I use Zine [1]. its inspired from Hugo, written in Zig. but probably not the "best" for some use cases.

[1] https://zine-ssg.io

Not sure about the best, but Zola is good enough for basic blogging needs. I liked the part that it was a single binary, so you don’t have to keep up with any breaking changes unless you want a new feature or a bug is bothering you.

Whatever you use, I feel it is tradition to have 3 odd blog posts about journey of building a SSG of your own since nothing else matched exactly what you needed and that’s it. Then you should forget that blog ever existed.

I made QIP Router where every part of rendering and making the HTTP response is customizable via WebAssembly. You often have a lot more control than a traditional static site generator that requires a particular plugin made — just make your own!

https://qip.dev/docs/router

I like Zola. It is opinionated, but easy to pick up and get running in an hour or so. Not so great if you are working on a large website with lots of interconnected pages, but perfect for a blog, personal, or small company website.

This is obvious and not an interesting observation.

The question is how to get a good and efficient dev experience while also preserving that level of speed.

AI has now made that question mostly irrelevant, since it can generate and rapidly edit vanilla webpages without a framework to make the DX better.

I recommend ditching Next.js in favor of Tanstack Start^1, an alternative metaframework that gives you more freedom, better DX, and better defaults. Stick w the best aspects of SPAs and introduce SSR selectively if and when it makes sense.

1. https://tanstack.com/blog/tanstack-start-1-0

Why are you writing the same view twice?

Same we moved from Wordpress to Hugo when looking to update our company site page. Using AI to update the legacy Wordpress theme just wasn’t it. Had updated brand and style guide, Claude made short work of porting to Hugo and Google speed rankings were excellent even without cdn etc

I use Hugo as well. If any of your pages have larger media, look into Pipes to get images ladder srcset built for you automatically. Very fancy. https://gohugo.io/hugo-pipes/introduction/