Most blogs I have seen over the years run on WordPress — a database, PHP, plugins, security patches every other week. A lot of moving parts for a site that basically publishes text. Hugo is the opposite of all that. No database. No runtime. Just plain HTML files served off a CDN, generated in under a second.
What is Hugo exactly — and why is it so fast? Hugo is an open-source static site generator written in Go [1]. You write content in Markdown, pick a theme, run one command, and it produces a folder of plain HTML, CSS, and JS. That folder is your entire website. Nothing runs on the server. No PHP, no Python, no Node process to keep alive.