I Built a Blazing Fast Website for $0/Month — Here's the Exact Stack (Hugo + Cloudflare Pages)

How I migrated from a $15/month WordPress site to a free static site using Hugo and Cloudflare Pages with 95-100 Lighthouse scores.

1 min read

I got tired of paying $15/month for a WordPress host that gave me 60/100 Lighthouse scores and a 2-second TTFB. So I rebuilt the whole thing as a static site. Here’s exactly what I used and why.

The Stack

  • Static site generator: Hugo 0.147.0
  • Hosting: Cloudflare Pages (free tier)
  • Analytics: Cloudflare Web Analytics (free, no cookies)
  • Domain: Namecheap (~$10/year)
  • Total cost: ~$10/year

Why Hugo Over Next.js / Gatsby / Eleventy

Build speed. Hugo builds in milliseconds — 400ms for my site. Eleventy takes 3–5 seconds. Next.js and Gatsby have multi-minute cold builds once the content grows.

Hugo is also a single binary. No node_modules, no package manager, no dependency hell. You download one file and it works.

Performance Results

  • Lighthouse score: 95–100
  • TTFB: sub-200ms globally via Cloudflare’s CDN
  • Deployment time: ~25 seconds from git push to live

Key Config That Made the Difference

Pin your Hugo version. Cloudflare uses an old default if you don’t set this explicitly in your environment variables:

HUGO_VERSION = 0.147.0

Immutable caching with fingerprinting. Hugo can content-address your CSS/JS filenames so you can set Cache-Control: immutable safely:

[build]
  writeStats = true

WebP image conversion. Hugo’s image processing pipeline converts and resizes at build time. I set quality to 82 — reduces file sizes 60–80% vs JPEG with no visible quality loss.

What You Give Up

No dynamic content, no user accounts, no server-side logic, no traditional CMS dashboard. For a content site this is a non-issue. For anything with user state, you’d need a different approach.

The Result

The site loads faster than anything I ran on WordPress, costs essentially nothing, and deploys automatically on every git push. Cloudflare Pages gives you unlimited bandwidth and 500 builds/month on the free tier.

Full site running this stack: laserengraverexpert.com