Hello!

Hey, I’m Ron. 👋

On this site, I cover the intersection of SEO and Hugo static websites.

I’m a professional SEO, and I’m working, and have worked, on some of Australia’s biggest websites. Here’s my LinkedIn profile.

I also build websites in Hugo—including this one, of course.

My stack

After several years of experimentation, my current stack is:

Hugo. Here are all my Hugo tutorials.
VS Code. I use VS Code as my Hugo code editor, localhost terminal, and for committing and pushing to GitHub. Here’s how I use VS Code to streamline my Hugo workflow.
GitHub. Now with free private repos. Thanks, Microsoft! No, I’m not sponsored by Microsoft, although I do use VS Code, GitHub and Edge. On a Mac and iPhone, though.
Netlify. Here’s how to host your personal Hugo site on the Netlify CDN for free. No more hosting account fees! I recently cancelled my traditional hosting plan with Zuver halfway through my cycle and got an $18 pro-rata credit, which I’ll put towards domain name renewals. Plus, I now save $36 on web hosting each year. That’s $180 over five years: a nice night out in a post-COVID world. Another benefit: I’ve learned a lot about how to use Netlify. This will save me time if I ever have to use it for an employer.
Stripe. I use Stripe Checkout to sell my premium SEO theme for Hugo directly on this site. I wrote a post about how to integrate Stripe Checkout with a static site like Hugo, if you want to read more.

Site builders I’ve used in the past

I’ve been building websites for a long time. I started off with DreamWeaver back in the day. I used Wordpress for many years, and Jekyll for a short time, before settling on Hugo.

Why I created this site

I created this site because I love great engineering, and I think Hugo is far better than WordPress for site speed, site security, version control and overall elegance.

Hugo is also a lot faster than other static site generators such as Jekyll when it comes to building your site.

However, Hugo doesn’t have a huge community yet, so I wanted to contribute my knowledge to further the ecosystem.

My Lighthouse scores

For all three page types on this site (homepage, article/tutorial, and section homepage/index), I have achieved a perfect 100 / 100 Lighthouse score for Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO. Since this isn’t a Progressive Web App (PWA), I wasn’t scored for that.

How to contact me

Here’s my Twitter (DMs open). My LinkedIn is near the top of this page. My email is ron dot erdos at [the site you’re on]. Another way to keep in touch is to subscribe to my “SEO meets Hugo” newsletter below. I’d love to stay in touch!

Thanks for reading

Thanks for reading. I appreciate it.

Cheers,

Ron Erdos
Sydney, Australia 👋