Best Static Site Generator

Choose by the job, not popularity: Astro for content and marketing sites that should ship little JavaScript, Hugo for very large sites that must build fast, Eleventy for a hand-crafted blog, and Next.js when static pages sit beside signed-in or dynamic ones.

• Marketing site, portfolio or blog with strong Core Web Vitals: Astro or Eleventy.
• Thousands of pages, documentation, fast rebuilds: Hugo.
• Product site mixing static marketing pages with app pages: Next.js (or Nuxt/SvelteKit for Vue or Svelte teams).
• Documentation portal: Docusaurus or VitePress.
• Non-developer who wants a desktop app and no terminal: Publii.

The practical differences are the language you write templates in, what each tool outputs and which folder you upload after the build.

Whichever you pick, the deliverable is the same: one folder of static files. If you need server rendering from Next.js instead of a static export, use a Node server as in deploying Next.js on a VPS.

Deployment is a file upload: build locally, zip the contents of the output folder, extract them into public_html, and add a 404 rule.

1. Run the build and confirm the output folder contains index.html.
2. Zip the contents of that folder, not the folder itself.
3. In the hosting File Manager, open public_html, upload the zip and extract it.
4. Create .htaccess in public_html with the rules below.
5. Enable the free SSL certificate, then load the home page, an inner page and a made-up URL.

ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

# long cache for fingerprinted assets (e.g. Astro's /_astro/ files)
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
  ExpiresActive On
  ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 year"
  ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 1 year"
  ExpiresByType image/webp "access plus 1 year"
</IfModule>

If every page returns 404, the files are one level too deep, such as public_html/dist/index.html. Astro, Hugo and Eleventy write each page as folder/index.html, so clean URLs work without rewrites; a Next.js export does the same only with trailingSlash: true. More rules are in the .htaccess guide.