I learned this lesson the hard way early on. When I started Gethugothemes, I noticed a pattern in the broader Hugo community—many developers were struggling with their template choices. Founders and developers would pick something beautiful, but it didn't match their actual needs. They'd struggle with poor documentation, abandoned themes, or templates that looked great but weren't built for real-world use cases. That's when I decided to build Gethugothemes differently—with themes that not only look stunning but are built for actual production use, backed by solid documentation and ongoing support.
This experience taught me what makes a template truly work. If you're a founder or developer looking to launch quickly with Hugo, the template you choose will either be your best friend or your biggest headache. Let me walk you through what I've learned so you can make the decision that actually serves your project—whether you choose one of ours or any other theme.
Understanding Your Real Needs (Before You Fall in Love With Design)
Here's the mistake I made: I chose a template because it looked stunning. It had gorgeous animations, smooth scrolling, and an aesthetic that made me feel like we'd finally "made it." But beautiful doesn't always mean functional for what you actually need.
Before you even look at templates, sit down and answer these questions honestly:
What's your primary goal? Are you building a blog, a portfolio, a documentation site, a landing page for your SaaS product, or something else? The template that's perfect for a technical blog might be completely wrong for a product marketing site. I know this sounds obvious, but you'd be surprised how many times founders (including me) skip this step.
What content structure do you need? Do you need portfolio projects, case studies, team bios, pricing tables, or testimonials? Will you be managing multiple content types? This matters because some templates are rigid about what they can display, while others give you flexibility. I once almost chose a template that had beautiful blog layouts but couldn't handle the case study format we needed. We would have had to hack around in the template code for weeks.
How technical is your team? This is crucial. If you're a solo founder who isn't comfortable diving into theme code, you need a template that works out of the box with minimal customization. If you have developers on your team who can modify YAML configurations and understand Hugo's templating system, you can work with something more complex. I didn't account for this and chose a highly customizable template that required more dev work than we had capacity for.
What's your timeline? If you need to launch in two weeks, you cannot afford to choose a template that has a steep learning curve. Pick something simpler that you can get running immediately. Speed matters more than perfection at that stage.
Evaluating Template Quality: Beyond the Pretty Pictures
This is where I started separating good templates from templates that only look good. When you're evaluating a Hugo theme, here's what actually matters:
Check the documentation first. Not the template's design documentation—I mean the setup and customization guide. Is it comprehensive? Are there examples for common scenarios? Good documentation is worth its weight in gold. If a theme has minimal or outdated documentation, that's a red flag. You'll end up spending hours on Stack Overflow trying to figure out something that should have taken minutes.
Look at the code quality. I know this sounds intimidating, but it doesn't have to be. Go to the GitHub repository and spend ten minutes scanning the code structure. Is it organized logically? Are the layouts clean or are they spaghetti code with nested divs everywhere? Well-maintained themes have clear folder structures, sensible naming conventions, and code that actually makes sense. Abandoned or poorly maintained themes often have inconsistent patterns and cryptic variable names. Your future self will thank you for choosing a well-organized theme.
Consider active maintenance. When was the last commit to the repository? Are issues being responded to? A theme that hasn't been updated in three years might be stable, but it's also likely not compatible with modern Hugo versions, and you won't get support if something breaks. I've learned to check the GitHub issues tab—if there are unanswered questions from six months ago, that tells you something about how responsive the maintainer is.
Verify responsive design and performance. Take the demo site through Google PageSpeed Insights or similar tools. A beautiful template that loads in six seconds is going to hurt your SEO and user experience. Test it on mobile. This seems obvious, but I've seen templates that look great on desktop but are barely usable on phones. In 2024, that's inexcusable.
The Customization Reality: Understanding Your Constraints
Here's what I didn't understand when I was starting out: the depth of customization differs wildly between templates, and not all "customizable" templates are actually customizable in the ways you need.
Some templates are built with Hugo's flexibility in mind. They use lots of configuration options in the config.toml or config.yaml file, giving you control without touching code. Others require you to fork the theme and modify the actual template files. Both approaches can work, but they have different implications.
If you choose a template that requires forking, you're essentially taking ownership of maintaining it. When Hugo updates, you might need to update your customized theme too. When the original theme gets improvements, you won't automatically get them. Conversely, templates built around configuration files let you update the theme while keeping your custom settings intact.
I made this mistake countless times with early templates at Gethugothemes. I thought "highly customizable" meant "easy to customize." It doesn't. A template can be customizable but require deep knowledge of Hugo's shortcodes, partials, and data files. If your team doesn't have that knowledge, you're either going to learn it on the fly (expensive in terms of time) or hire someone to do it for you (expensive in terms of money).
My recommendation: prioritize templates that let you achieve 80% of what you need through configuration alone. Then, only if necessary, fork the theme to handle the remaining 20%.
Hidden Pain Points to Avoid
Over the months of working with Hugo templates at Gethugothemes—reviewing submissions, hearing feedback from thousands of users, and watching what works and what doesn't—I've discovered some pain points that don't show up on the template's demo site:
Accessibility often gets overlooked. Many beautiful templates fail basic accessibility checks. If you care about WCAG compliance or just want your site to be usable for everyone, test the template with a screen reader. Check the HTML for semantic markup. This matters for both ethics and SEO.
Bloat is a real issue. Some templates come bundled with features you'll never use—JavaScript libraries you don't need, CSS for layouts you won't employ, dependencies that slow everything down. Leaner templates give you more control and better performance.
Shortcodes and content dependencies. If a template relies heavily on custom shortcodes to display content properly, you're tying your content to that specific template. If you ever want to switch themes, migrating content becomes a nightmare. I learned this the hard way with a template that used three custom shortcodes for almost every content block. When we wanted to try a different look, we were stuck.
Upgrade path confusion. Before committing to a template, try to understand what upgrading looks like. Is it a simple git pull? Will your customizations survive an upgrade? What's the breaking change policy? This matters way more six months in than it does on day one.
My Process for Choosing (What Actually Works)
Here's the framework I use now:
1. Make a shortlist. Use Hugo's official theme showcase and curated lists, but filter aggressively. Create a list of five to eight themes that have the core functionality you need.
2. Spend time with each one. Don't just look at the live demo. Clone the theme, run it locally, and actually use it. Try adding some custom content. See how it feels. This takes an hour per theme, but it's the best hour you'll spend because you'll catch integration issues real humans experience, not just the polished demo experience.
3. Evaluate against your criteria. Score each template against the questions you answered earlier. Which one hits the most important needs? Which one has the best documentation for your team's skill level?
4. Make a prototype. Before fully committing, build a prototype of your actual site with your top two choices. This means actually adding your real content, making configuration changes, and testing customizations. I recommend giving this a full day. You'll learn more in that day than you could in a week of research.
5. Check the escape hatch. Before you commit, verify that switching templates later wouldn't be a disaster. Hugo sites are relatively portable—as long as you're not deeply embedding theme-specific logic into your content, you can usually switch themes without losing everything. This peace of mind is worth its weight in gold.
The Decision
Choosing a Hugo template isn't a life-or-death decision, but it does impact your velocity. The right template compounds—it makes future changes easier, maintains good performance, and doesn't become a technical debt burden. The wrong template does the opposite.
I can't tell you which specific template to choose because it depends on your unique situation. But if you work through this process systematically, you'll make a decision you won't regret. And six months from now, when you're making updates to your site and everything feels smooth, you'll be grateful you spent the time getting this right from the beginning.
The goal isn't perfection. It's finding the template that works well enough for your needs so you can stop thinking about the template and start thinking about your actual product. That's what we've always tried to do at Gethugothemes—curate templates that solve real problems, not just look pretty.
Over the years, our templates have matured significantly. We've taken the pain away by building robust, battle-tested themes that handle the edge cases before you run into them. It's rare to find issues with Gethugothemes templates because they've been refined through thousands of real-world implementations. And on the rare occasion when something does come up, our product and support team stays vigilant—we're constantly monitoring, updating, and ensuring everything works smoothly for our users.
I hope this framework helps you choose wisely, and if you decide to use one of our templates, you'll experience the peace of mind that comes from knowing you've picked something that's been proven to work.
