I think the build time is the least factor to take in consideration. I choose Jekyll some time ago because: - it was supported by github - the plain website generated was much FASTER than anything with a database (WP I'm talking at you) - as a developer I could mess with HTML and JS wasily

Build time is important at development time, when I'm programming some new feature, and I have to wait 1-2 seconds before refreshing the page. If those changes take 20 seconds, well, that's a horrible development experience.

So, for now, I'll definitely give Hugo a try (didn't even know) but we do websites for people and we should only care that the website is fast, nice and easy for them.

I 100% agree that there are many factors to take into account. Liquid templating is a huge benefit of Jekyll, for example. This article was just looking at build times and we'll put another one out soon looking at other factors.

I'm testing out hugo + netlify for blog posts, and tried to use forestry.io as the dashboard + editor, and it looks great, EXCEPT that it messed with the MathJax (math notation within double-dollar signs) in my markdown posts. Why doesn't it just leave it as raw text that I can edit?

If you run a Jekyll or Hugo site (or other), we would love to know what your build times are. For example:

Static Site Generator: Jekyll

Approximate number of pages: 200

Build time: 3.4 seconds

Your comment caught my curiosity, and looking at the hugo command line I just found out it had a `benchmark` command. Cool!

For our main website (www.processout.com, ~100 pages) and blog, hugo takes about 39ms (on a Macbook Pro, late 2016)