Next.js is not a good fit for most applications. It honestly never has been. It has just been Vercel's relentless over-the-top marketing that has been trying to convince junior developers that it is.
Next.js supports fully static export, so they should have went with that.
I run a dynamic website on nextjs static export - landingpages and docs are fully static, login and user dashboard use REST calls to a non-nextjs backend. Blazing fast, no nodejs or SSR in production.
Wouldn't say unnecesarry. Nextjs static export has features such as dynamic chunking, eager-loading of chunks when you hover over a link, routing etc. With a plugin you get image optimization (different image quality levels and dimensions based on viewport size) etc.
But yes, another static site blog generator would also work.
> Wouldn't say unnecesarry. Nextjs static export has features such as dynamic chunking, eager-loading of chunks when you hover over a link, routing etc.
As someone who's ran a blog for 25 years it's surprising I never knew these things were necessary until now.
My super large SPA loads in 150ms on localhost. Yes, if it were just a static blog I might get it down to about 60ms.
The problem isn’t the size of the code. It’s the unnecessary framework complexity. Suggesting this to a corporate JavaScript developer, though, is like throwing acid on your own face as they whine about how impossible it is to do their jobs.
The vast majority of websites don't need Next.js or React. Those are only useful if you need dynamic and modular updates within the structure, or state management. We've defaulted to React because of the name recognition and simple intertia. It's not a good framework for websites in general.
I'm not convinced you need React/Next.js even in those cases. Web components work and LLMs are so capable of using them that I find there is increasingly little utility in big frameworks.
Difference is in the eventing model and complexity of state management in React's hooks based model vs vanilla's. WC is aligned with how JS callbacks naturally work. React is the only framework that points the callback to the component function.
I use Hugo published to Github Pages for my blog. I've never thought about performance (it's Fast Enough™ when I visit it), but I just checked and it's 100 on pagespeed. The magic of a static HTML blog is you don't have to think about performance. An entire category of problem just disappears.
I use Hugo as well. If any of your pages have larger media, look into Pipes to get images ladder srcsets built for you automatically. Very fancy. https://gohugo.io/hugo-pipes/introduction/
An “image ladder” is the same image resampled at several widths. It’s not a standard term; MDN calls the technique “resolution switching”.
A srcset lists those versions, and the browser picks the one that fits the current viewport and screen density. https://responsiveimages.org/ has details.
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
Hugo is great. I had Claude make the framework for my wifes site using Hugo, Netlify free tier, and Decap CMS. And I forced Claude to avoid any Javascript for the non CMS parts.
I wrote not so basic CRUD application that uses HTML and vanilla javascript. I don't even minify the javascript. That website loads significantly faster than all the other websites I have made.
It is obvious, yet so many people don't understand it.
There is no secret ingredient, writing a website, or anything really, without a framework is not wildly more difficult than using a framework.
Save for a few cases where all you really want to do is covered by the default configuration, you generally don't end up writing a lot less code with a framework. Worst case, you end up spending most of your time working around the framework.
> you generally don't end up writing a lot less code with a framework
What? This is absolutely untrue for anything that isn't a trivial v1 prototype. Complex applications have a lot of boilerplate, which is unavoidable with the baggage of HTML and CSS.
There's a reason people are obsessed with web frameworks. Writing vanilla HTML/CSS/JS for large or complex apps is an enormous pain.
I have a next.js SSG blog that easily hits 100 and loads ~instantly. I just don't think there's any point trying to have a rational discussion about next on hn.
Not to brag*, but that's what I've been doing since 2013 on my php blog [0]. It was actually the result of a hn warm hug of death. My CDN is just a separate webserver serving all static assets using nginx.
Both my css and js are dynamically minified and included in the html depending on which component is loaded on the page.
Am I missing something? Nextjs static export would have solved this I feel. And hosting it on Cloudflare Pages and put the CDN in front and you're done.
Having said that, sure perhaps Astro would be lighter than Nextjs.
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.
Astro is based on npm is it not? Given the state of that ecosystem and the rate at which new vulnerabilities are being discovered these days, I prefer to stay as far away from Node as I can.
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.
The server islands are completely optional tho, if you don’t want to use them, you don’t have to. For a simple blog you can just use collections, and plain HTML/CSS.
I’ve used Astro for more complex applications, and it’s perfectly suitable for that too.
Of course, if you’re building an SPA, then it’s probably not the best choice.
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.
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 moved away from Hugo because I was tired of it breaking backwards compatibility. I found that upgrading my Hugo version meant that old static website projects wouldn’t compile, and needed amendments. I keep an older Hugo binary around as I don’t have time for that now. Any new website projects are Astro, and I will aim to convert the older projects to Astro when time allows.
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.
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've been using Astro for my main blog and have been reasonably happy with it, but recently branched out for my Lab site to be just a simple static hub built with Vite/TypeScript/Tailwind, where each project subpage is bundled in its own slug folder so they can bring in additional dependencies.
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!
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.
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...
I've done this after evaluating some "ready made please deploy me" solutions. Ended up picked Rust with Axum and it's crazy fast, code is super simple, but really powerful.
This is the right answer to the vague question of "best".
I started with an empty repo, wrote the first half of a README describing my decision-making process in choosing a static site generator, and conversed with an AI to finish the decision and set everything up.
I feel like these large frameworks will slowly die out with the advent of agents.
The big selling point of them was a fast, convenient dev experience with many features (most often unused) being built-in.
Now, those built-in features are becoming a security risk as more vulnerabilities are being found in their 1000s of lines of code, and the developer experience benefit is being nullified by agents whittling away the human involvement anyway.
It's surely not difficult to tell the LLM to not use various tools and techniques? At least that works when I use one to create Bash scripts. Anything slightly complicated and the LLM drags in a dependency on Python when an AWK script would most likely be faster, shorter, and easier to maintain. So I just tell it 'Don't use Python',
Yeah, for now. I sense sentiment shifting against these frameworks lately, it might be reflected in their training in a few models time. Or, it’s possible I’m completely off the mark.
We use nextjs at work and I hate it. Why write each view once when you could write it twice?
I'm open to the idea that we're doing it wrong and that there's a correct and pleasant way to write nextjs, but I think with the tools available today, everyone should just profile and optimize their app so they don't need to render it serverside.
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.
Didn't downvote, but my thought on your comment is: "More freedom" -> "More decision paralysis & anxiety", "New better framework X" -> "Latest hypecycle that will be require me to rewrite and relearn a framework that is deprecated in 18 months" etc.
It's pretty easy to get 100 on every lighthouse category even while using next. The scoring is based on how fast a page loads and what blocks its loading time. If you develop it with a bit of care, that is a non-issue. My funny agency website (https://www.pixlw.com/) is purely nextjs and it scores a 100 on Lighthouse as well because I kept working on it till it didn't.
Respectfully, I don't understand this. They never needed Next.js for a static blog.
This is like writing a post about how I didn't need a Ferrari to commute to work and I saved money by taking the bus.
Next.js is not a good fit for most applications. It honestly never has been. It has just been Vercel's relentless over-the-top marketing that has been trying to convince junior developers that it is.
Next.js supports fully static export, so they should have went with that.
I run a dynamic website on nextjs static export - landingpages and docs are fully static, login and user dashboard use REST calls to a non-nextjs backend. Blazing fast, no nodejs or SSR in production.
Next.js supports fully static export, so they should went with that.
Keeping an unnecessary dependency for legacy reasons is never a good move. Be bold and delete things. Your software will be better for it.
Wouldn't say unnecesarry. Nextjs static export has features such as dynamic chunking, eager-loading of chunks when you hover over a link, routing etc. With a plugin you get image optimization (different image quality levels and dimensions based on viewport size) etc.
But yes, another static site blog generator would also work.
My experience with Next.js is that because it mixes multiple paradigms, it makes using any single one of them more complicated and error prone.
Not just as the dev delivering the solution, but also library and package authors.
Ran into lots of issues around Next 12, Next 13 was very buggy, moved to Astro and never looked back.
> Wouldn't say unnecesarry. Nextjs static export has features such as dynamic chunking, eager-loading of chunks when you hover over a link, routing etc.
As someone who's ran a blog for 25 years it's surprising I never knew these things were necessary until now.
The static export still keeps a large JS bundle which is mostly unnecessary
Astro blows away next.js for static sites, especially blogs.
Care to elaborate and backup you wild claim with some facts?
How is it a wild claim that an optimized plain html site is better for a static blog than a site with a huge redundant JS bundle?
I think we should blame the elders for teaching people new to the trade wrong.
Because "heavyweight SPA for a static blog" isn't exactly a rare problem.
My super large SPA loads in 150ms on localhost. Yes, if it were just a static blog I might get it down to about 60ms.
The problem isn’t the size of the code. It’s the unnecessary framework complexity. Suggesting this to a corporate JavaScript developer, though, is like throwing acid on your own face as they whine about how impossible it is to do their jobs.
It wasn't the elders, it was Vercel itself which has a vested interest
It's more like they realised they can also commute by bike or foot never realizing before that that was even an option
exactly just use a ssg like zola/hugo and call it a day smh
My home is much easier to heat now I've moved from an aircraft hanger into a cottage.
The vast majority of websites don't need Next.js or React. Those are only useful if you need dynamic and modular updates within the structure, or state management. We've defaulted to React because of the name recognition and simple intertia. It's not a good framework for websites in general.
I'm not convinced you need React/Next.js even in those cases. Web components work and LLMs are so capable of using them that I find there is increasingly little utility in big frameworks.
Any web components solution is probably going to be as big as React
Difference is in the eventing model and complexity of state management in React's hooks based model vs vanilla's. WC is aligned with how JS callbacks naturally work. React is the only framework that points the callback to the component function.
No idea why this idea is being downvoted, because it is totally correct, even more so in the LLM-coding era.
I use Hugo published to Github Pages for my blog. I've never thought about performance (it's Fast Enough™ when I visit it), but I just checked and it's 100 on pagespeed. The magic of a static HTML blog is you don't have to think about performance. An entire category of problem just disappears.
I use Hugo as well. If any of your pages have larger media, look into Pipes to get images ladder srcsets built for you automatically. Very fancy. https://gohugo.io/hugo-pipes/introduction/
What’s an image ladder src set?
An “image ladder” is the same image resampled at several widths. It’s not a standard term; MDN calls the technique “resolution switching”.
A srcset lists those versions, and the browser picks the one that fits the current viewport and screen density. https://responsiveimages.org/ has details.
For an example, view the source of https://photostructure.com/tags/. All the header art looks like this:
<picture><source type="image/webp" srcset="/img/2026/05/desk-2000w_hu_f9b8e901c6d3512c.webp 400w, /img/2026/05/desk-2000w_hu_4e2d65cccd03c969.webp 800w, /img/2026/05/desk-2000w_hu_11f3bf6c90dbf78d.webp 1200w, /img/2026/05/desk-2000w_hu_8c1a7d0a013e4ee2.webp 1600w, /img/2026/05/desk-2000w_hu_4cebe999e55b5486.webp 2000w" sizes="100vw"><source type="image/jpeg" srcset="/img/2026/05/desk-2000w_hu_cf5671a2e3bdd0cc.jpg 400w, /img/2026/05/desk-2000w_hu_2906e4ba7cda040.jpg 800w, /img/2026/05/desk-2000w_hu_f59ef0388799d4d2.jpg 1200w, /img/2026/05/desk-2000w_hu_e183d28df837e14a.jpg 1600w, /img/2026/05/desk-2000w_hu_ea9c422963c8e0e1.jpg 2000w" sizes="100vw"><img src="/img/2026/05/desk-2000w_hu_f59ef0388799d4d2.jpg" width="1200" height="600" alt="About" class="w-100 header-image" loading="eager"></picture>
That’s generated by https://gist.github.com/mceachen/d5915e46d1294489698e155eb11..., which uses Hugo’s resources.Get and .Resize.
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
Hugo is great. I had Claude make the framework for my wifes site using Hugo, Netlify free tier, and Decap CMS. And I forced Claude to avoid any Javascript for the non CMS parts.
I wrote not so basic CRUD application that uses HTML and vanilla javascript. I don't even minify the javascript. That website loads significantly faster than all the other websites I have made.
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.
It is obvious, yet so many people don't understand it.
There is no secret ingredient, writing a website, or anything really, without a framework is not wildly more difficult than using a framework.
Save for a few cases where all you really want to do is covered by the default configuration, you generally don't end up writing a lot less code with a framework. Worst case, you end up spending most of your time working around the framework.
> you generally don't end up writing a lot less code with a framework
What? This is absolutely untrue for anything that isn't a trivial v1 prototype. Complex applications have a lot of boilerplate, which is unavoidable with the baggage of HTML and CSS.
There's a reason people are obsessed with web frameworks. Writing vanilla HTML/CSS/JS for large or complex apps is an enormous pain.
Do tech influencers never tire of announcing their incompetency in their subject area?
Who is this guy? The blog has just this single post
Seemingly not
Nextjs can get you 100 if you use it properly. Like anything it’s just a tool that can increase complexity if you want it to
I have a next.js SSG blog that easily hits 100 and loads ~instantly. I just don't think there's any point trying to have a rational discussion about next on hn.
I’ve been beating giants in SEO with a static site precompiled at deployment time through includes with Gulp. Plain vanilla JS and CSS.
Not to brag*, but that's what I've been doing since 2013 on my php blog [0]. It was actually the result of a hn warm hug of death. My CDN is just a separate webserver serving all static assets using nginx.
Both my css and js are dynamically minified and included in the html depending on which component is loaded on the page.
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/handling-1-million-web-request
* I am bragging
I got straight 100s using SvelteKit on https://c3.ventures
Does your static site really need JS at all?
Sometimes. It depends on what it is doing and on how good you, or your companion LLM, is at modern CSS.
Am I missing something? Nextjs static export would have solved this I feel. And hosting it on Cloudflare Pages and put the CDN in front and you're done.
Having said that, sure perhaps Astro would be lighter than Nextjs.
What are the best static site generators for blogs these days?
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.
Astro is based on npm is it not? Given the state of that ecosystem and the rate at which new vulnerabilities are being discovered these days, I prefer to stay as far away from Node as I can.
Npm? It’s just the package manager. You can use pnpm or yarn or bun if you like?
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.
The server islands are completely optional tho, if you don’t want to use them, you don’t have to. For a simple blog you can just use collections, and plain HTML/CSS.
I’ve used Astro for more complex applications, and it’s perfectly suitable for that too.
Of course, if you’re building an SPA, then it’s probably not the best choice.
+1 for TanStack Router (and TanStack Start if your needs evolve to merit a metaframework).
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
Astro https://astro.build/
Astro is fantastic.
https://astro.build/
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 moved away from Hugo because I was tired of it breaking backwards compatibility. I found that upgrading my Hugo version meant that old static website projects wouldn’t compile, and needed amendments. I keep an older Hugo binary around as I don’t have time for that now. Any new website projects are Astro, and I will aim to convert the older projects to Astro when time allows.
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/
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'm not a blogger, but I run multiple blogs.
I've been using Astro for my main blog and have been reasonably happy with it, but recently branched out for my Lab site to be just a simple static hub built with Vite/TypeScript/Tailwind, where each project subpage is bundled in its own slug folder so they can bring in additional dependencies.
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.
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.
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
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
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/
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...
I've done this after evaluating some "ready made please deploy me" solutions. Ended up picked Rust with Axum and it's crazy fast, code is super simple, but really powerful.
This is the right answer to the vague question of "best".
I started with an empty repo, wrote the first half of a README describing my decision-making process in choosing a static site generator, and conversed with an AI to finish the decision and set everything up.
https://writing.brlewis.com/posts/2026/blog-based-on-git/
Turns out static html and css is pretty good for static content?
I feel like these large frameworks will slowly die out with the advent of agents.
The big selling point of them was a fast, convenient dev experience with many features (most often unused) being built-in.
Now, those built-in features are becoming a security risk as more vulnerabilities are being found in their 1000s of lines of code, and the developer experience benefit is being nullified by agents whittling away the human involvement anyway.
Sadly, the code LLM tools seem to default to the NextJS dumpsterfire stack.
It's surely not difficult to tell the LLM to not use various tools and techniques? At least that works when I use one to create Bash scripts. Anything slightly complicated and the LLM drags in a dependency on Python when an AWK script would most likely be faster, shorter, and easier to maintain. So I just tell it 'Don't use Python',
Yeah, for now. I sense sentiment shifting against these frameworks lately, it might be reflected in their training in a few models time. Or, it’s possible I’m completely off the mark.
Sentiment needs sentience, direction we're heading is the average of what exists, which works but is senseless.
We use nextjs at work and I hate it. Why write each view once when you could write it twice?
I'm open to the idea that we're doing it wrong and that there's a correct and pleasant way to write nextjs, but I think with the tools available today, everyone should just profile and optimize their app so they don't need to render it serverside.
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
Or for a serious stack like Phoenix Liveview.
Liveview is neat, but it still has quite some raw edges - and it’s not really meant for SSG which is the topic at hand
I'd be grateful if whoever downvoted my comment could explain what they found objectionable.
Didn't downvote, but my thought on your comment is: "More freedom" -> "More decision paralysis & anxiety", "New better framework X" -> "Latest hypecycle that will be require me to rewrite and relearn a framework that is deprecated in 18 months" etc.
Why are you writing the same view twice?
It's pretty easy to get 100 on every lighthouse category even while using next. The scoring is based on how fast a page loads and what blocks its loading time. If you develop it with a bit of care, that is a non-issue. My funny agency website (https://www.pixlw.com/) is purely nextjs and it scores a 100 on Lighthouse as well because I kept working on it till it didn't.
Caching isn't essential if you can come up with the pages fast enough, unless you need a CDN due to factors like distance.
Water is wet. Amazing.