Zola as a static site generator

For years, I relied on Hugo or Next.js to build static sites. But after discovering Zola, I’m convinced it’s a strong contender in terms of simplicity, performance, and developer experience.

I used to create static sites with either Hugo or Next.js. Both are powerful tools, but they come with trade-offs:

• Next.js feels heavy for simple use cases. For static sites, it always felt kind of overkill to me.
• Hugo is fast and feature-rich, but I always struggled with its templating engine. It’s powerful, but the syntax and workflow never felt intuitive to me as a non-Go developer.

Recently, I learned about Zola, a Rust-based static site generator. My first thought was performance—Rust is known for speed, and Zola doesn’t disappoint.

But speed isn’t the only advantage. While building this blog, I realized Zola offers:

• A simple build toolchain: No complex dependencies or bloated configurations. Just install, write, and build.
• Minimal fuss: Everything works out of the box. No need to fight with the tool to get basic tasks done.
• Built-in support for Sass: No additional setup needed to have SCSS enabled.

What truly sold me on Zola, though, is its Tera templating engine. Unlike Hugo’s Go templates, Tera is based on Jinja2, which feels more modern and intuitive. Writing templates is straightforward, and the syntax is clean and easy to debug.

After using Zola for this blog, I’m convinced it’s the best static site generator for my needs. It combines Hugo’s performance with a templating engine I actually enjoy using. No bloat, no unnecessary complexity — just a fast, reliable tool that gets the job done. Plus, the available themes seem to grow continuously, so probably Hugo and Zola will become on par rather sooner than later in that regard. If you’re tired of fighting with your static site generator, give Zola a try.