November 18, 2023
Popularity of Hugo
I use Hugo to build websites. But is Hugo popular? When you look at the top one million websites (according to BuiltWith) I would say: No.
After WordPress, Drupal is the first system that is widely known for website building and it has only 2.5% market share. Joomla has less than half of that and Hugo has only one tenth of the amount of Drupal. Hugo is not popular… this may be clear.
However, many of my fellow developers in the Netherlands use Umbraco, which is only half as popular as Hugo. Even Google Sites, that has been around forever, is not as popular as Hugo. So for an unpopular system it is actually not bad. Jekyll is one of the oldest SSG’s and is only half as popular as Hugo.
| WordPress | 25.33% |
| Drupal | 2.53% |
| Joomla | 1.17% |
| Hugo | 0.27% |
| Google Sites | 0.21% |
| Craft | 0.19% |
| Ghost | 0.18% |
| Jekyll | 0.17% |
| Umbraco | 0.15% |
| Strapi | 0.12% |
| Medium | 0.12% |
| Tumblr | 0.12% |
| Weebly | 0.07% |
| Hexo | 0.01% |
But let’s analyze the dataset as well. What does the top one million actually mean? It means the top 1,000,000 sites by traffic, thus only ‘very important’ websites.
I think Hugo is most suitable for relatively simple brochure websites. It could be that when you look at LESS popular websites, the amount of Hugo websites is significantly higher. It is also likely that the amount of Jekyll websites will then be higher than the amount of Hugo websites, as Jekyll is longer around, only works for small websites and because all Github Pages are free and Jekyll-based.
What do you think?
() Joost van der Schee