I'm really interested to try staticman to run from a pi, but I found a bunch of different ways that I'll experiment with and have listed here.

That page is geared towards GitHub Pages\Jekyll, however a number of the solutions are SSG agnostic.

https://staticman.net/

https://github.com/aioobe/dead-simple-jekyll-comments

https://infominer.id/web-work/posts/github-pages-starter-pac...

Op here, I am using Disqus for comments. This is very easy to setup. My template even supports this out-of-the-box. Google Analytics is even easier - the only thing you have to do is set your analytics ID in your hugo site configuration.

Not OP, but you can embed Google Analytics (or Tag Manager) into your Hugo template, and it's fairly straightforward to do.

Comments I'm not entirely sure of, because I never wanted them on my site in the first place!

For comments you can embed an external service, like Disqus.

Agree! And I'm sure it's also another script to add to the templates, at the footer of a post template, probably?

For comments, check out https://commento.io

Thanks for the input, I will do some reading regarding Disqus VS commento.

Another Disqus alternative you maybe haven't heard about? https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments (this too with privacy, no ads etc. I'm developing it. Feedback & feature wishes = welcome)