Credit: Hannah Stryker / How-To Geek

Are you looking to start your own blog, but you’re trying to avoid expensive hosting and complicated programming? Static site generators are a fantastic alternative.

These three static site generators can transform your plain-text Markdown files into a full-blown website in just a few clicks, making them fantastic code-free blogging platforms.

Hugo

As far as static site generators go, Hugo is one of the most popular out there. With Hugo, you can write your entire website in Markdown, while Hugo handles the translation to web code.

Written in Go, Hugo is designed with speed in mind. It’s cross-platform and even has an embedded web server so you can develop locally without having to install a LAMP or LEMP stack. This has to be one of my favorite parts, as configuring a local web server is something that I always dread doing. So, having that integrated is a huge plus for me.

I use Hugo to power my Minecraft server website and have had a great experience with it. There are a wide range of free themes to choose from, or you can write your own. The community around Hugo is sizable, with plenty of community-made themes and extensions for you to deploy.

With Hugo, you can continually update the website with new posts, backlinking to old posts and building out a full-on blog with ease. In fact, Hugo works natively with GitHub pages to give you a website without spending a dime.

When it comes to features, Hugo is definitely well-rounded. I love how flexible the frramework is, how often it’s updated (sometimes multiple times per week), the vast theme library available for it, and the robust community support it has.

Hugo is my personal choice when it comes to static site generators, as it’s simply one of the most popular out there. This means that, if I run into an issue, there’s likely already an answer available to solve whatever problem I’m facing. Not to say other static site generators don’t have great communities, I’ve just become fond of the support around Hugo.

Zola

Credit: Zola

Zola is quite similar to Hugo, but written in a different language. While Hugo is written in Go, Zola is written in Rust. Overall, the functionality is very similar between the two though.

Zola’s template engine is pretty robust and makes it easy for you to build themes and more. According to its documentation, most sites are built in less than a second, including all SASS compilation and syntax highlighting.

Similar to Hugo, you’ll write your website in Markdown files and Zola will translate those files to be web-ready. As such, Zola is extremely scalable regardless of what web server you’re using to host your website.

You can also deploy a Zola-built website on GitHub Pages for free, making it another solid option if you’re trying to host a website without paying a dime.

Eleventy (11ty)

If you’re not a fan of Go or Rust, then Eleventy is built for you. It functions quite the same as Zola and Hugo, but uses Node.JS as its backend. The themes and community aren’t quite as robust as Hugo or Zola, but the platform is just as good.

Just like the other two static site generators, you’ll be able to write your website in Markdown and Eleventy will convert that to a static website page. Since it’s based on Node.JS, you will have to have Node installed on your system for it to function. However, Eleventy does come with an embedded web server built-in so you can run it locally without having to spin up a full web stack.

Eleventy supports GitHub pages for hosting, as well as quite a few other providers, giving you the ability to choose who hosts your website. Of course, you can also host it yourself if you’d rather do that for greater control.

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Overall, regardless of whether you go with Hugo, Zola, or Eleventy, you won’t be disappointed. Being able to write an entire website in Markdown instead of HTML is fantastic, and something that I wish existed many years ago. Plus, the fact that these static site generators work with GitHub pages (and many other providers) means that you can run your own website or blog without spending a dime.

Also, I do want to mention that you can definitely host Hugo, Zola, or Eleventy yourself on your own server. If you don’t want to use GitHub or any web host, then just spin up your own server at home! It’s easier than you think.

If you’re not sure that a static site generator is for you, I did a rundown comparing Ghost, WordPress, and Hugo (or any other static site generator). Each platform has its stregnths and weaknesses, so a static site generator might not be the best fit for you. Before deploying your website, just make sure you pick the right tool for the job so you’re not switching between platforms and hosts every two months (something I did until I finally landed on the platform I loved).