I just wondered what everyones opinion (or actual data) on what was the best static site generator was in terms of outputting the smallest website in production. For example Nuxt seems to compile quite a lot of JS files even if you’re not using many of the features. It’s still blazingly fast but are there more light weight options?
I suppose this depends on your needs and your platform. BBEdit with persistent includes and code optimization would allow you to have the most website using the least code, but some assembly is required.
If we’re talking about raw building speeds only, Hugo is the fastest. It builds in a few milliseconds and for very small websites, the number might be in single-digits.
However, since Hugo is not really a framework, rather just a website generator, you need to do all the code writing yourself. That is, just like React has React Router, or Gatsby optimises pages during build, Hugo would do none of that thing. You’d have to take care of optimization yourself.