So easy to use. So easy to customize. You’re going to love the content you build better with ButterCMS.
Handy integration with Hugo
Our Hugo CMS has a simple content API and drop-in Hugo SDK that makes the magic happen in minutes, not hours.
A truly zero-maintenance solution
With ButterCMS, you’ll never worry about security upgrades, hosting, or performance again.
Powerful CMS for Hugo. Zero headache.
Drop our API-based CMS into your Hugo app in minutes.
ButterCMS provides a component-based CMS and content API for Hugo and Hugo apps. Use ButterCMS to enable dynamic content in your apps for page content, blogs, and anything else. Most customers get our Hugo CMS set up in one hour or less.
That leaves plenty of time for you and your marketing team to do what you do best: create killer apps with killer content.
After shopping the market, it was clear that ButterCMS was the perfect choice. It allows our developers to build powerful components and makes it easy for our marketing team to drive a better customer experience.
Hampton Catlin Creator of Sass and Haml
Deploy our Hugo Starter in 30 seconds!
Or follow the below commands to clone a copy of the repo from github, install dependencies, set your free Butter token, and
run your local server on localhost:1313/.
$ git clone https://github.com/ButterCMS/hugo-starter-buttercms.git
$ cd hugo-starter-buttercms
$ go mod download
$ echo 'BUTTERCMS_API_TOKEN=your_token' >> .env
$ go run github.com/ButterCMS/hugo-starter-buttercms/prebuild
$ hugo server
Built to make content marketing easy
ButterCMS is the best headless cms for Hugo for a simple reason: Hugo developers can build solutions that marketing people love. Our API allows your content gurus to quickly spin up high-converting, dynamic landing pages, SEO pages, product marketing pages, and more, all using simple drag-and-drop functionality.
Our mission was to make it easy to integrate Butter with your existing Hugo app in minutes. It’s so simple! To demonstrate, here’s a mini tutorial to give you a feel for the process of adding marketing pages to your Hugo or Hugo app.
See how easily you can integrate the ButterCMS Pages API with your Hugo app.
Seamless Hugo components
Empower your marketing team with dynamic landing pages that align perfectly with your Hugo components.
Components are the essential building blocks of any Hugo app, and ButterCMS handles them with ease.
Our drag and drop interface makes it simple to structure your content to match existing Hugo components, and to create new reusable components whenever you need them.
One Hugo CMS with everything you need
There’s a reason so many developers are choosing a headless Hugo CMS. It’s easy to set up, offers flexible, customizable content modeling, and gives you access to our full Hugo API.
2. Now, let's fetch some content from Butter! As soon as you create your Butter account, a sample page, "simple page", is set up for you. We can quickly use the Butter Go SDK to fetch your page and return it as a json response.
With Butter, you can fetch all your pages, page types, collections, blog posts, and more as simple json responses for your Hugo app! It's really that easy!
Adopting a headless architecture with Hugo as your static site generator can transform your web development experience. Let's explore the key benefits of headless architecture paired with Hugo.
Speed and performance
Hugo is renowned for its blazing-fast build times, generating static pages in milliseconds. When paired with a headless CMS, you can achieve optimized content delivery that significantly enhances your site's performance. Hugo's efficiency allows for rapid deployments, even for sites with thousands of pages.
Hugo's strength: Hugo's Go-based templating system and built-in asset pipeline contribute to its exceptional speed.
Headless synergy: A headless CMS can serve content via API, allowing Hugo to generate static pages quickly without querying a database for each request.
Scalability
Hugo's unique approach to static site generation sets it apart in terms of scalability. Unlike many other static site generators, Hugo uses a highly efficient, parallelized build process that leverages Go's concurrency model. This means Hugo can handle sites with thousands of pages with minimal impact on build times, often completing in mere seconds what might take minutes with other tools.
A headless CMS complements Hugo's scalability by managing the content load efficiently. It can serve content via APIs, which can be easily distributed across global CDNs for rapid delivery.
Hugo's versatility in supporting various front-end technologies means your scalability isn't limited to just content volume. You can easily integrate Hugo with modern JavaScript frameworks, allowing you to scale in size, complexity, and functionality.
Enhanced security
When you pair Hugo with a headless CMS, you add another layer of security. The CMS backend, where content is managed, is completely separate from the public-facing website.
This separation means that even if an attacker were to gain access to the CMS, they wouldn't have direct access to your website's hosting environment.
Hugo's approach to generating static sites goes beyond typical static site generators in terms of security. Its built-in template security features automatically sanitize user input, which helps prevent cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.
Each page is pre-rendered, leaving minimal opportunity for malicious code injection or other common web vulnerabilities.
Improved content management
While Hugo excels at static site generation, a headless CMS can provide a user-friendly interface for content management.
Visualize your marketing team swiftly updating landing pages and launching campaigns at the speed of light, bridging the gap between developers and content creators.
Hugo's content structure: Hugo's content organization allows for flexible and powerful content modeling.
Headless workflow: Content editors can work in a familiar environment while developers leverage Hugo's powerful features, improving overall workflow efficiency.
Developer-friendly environment
Hugo is designed with developers in mind, offering a range of features that streamline the development process.
Hugo's developer tools: Built-in Sass processing, asset minification, and other developer-friendly features make Hugo a joy to work with.
Headless integration: Many headless CMSs offer SDKs and APIs that integrate smoothly with Hugo, enhancing the developer experience.
Why ButterCMS and Hugo make a powerful pair
Discover the dynamic duo of Hugo and ButterCMS. Here’s why this combo is a game-changer:
Complementary performance optimization
Hugo's lightning-fast static site generation paired with ButterCMS's API-first approach creates a performance powerhouse.
Hugo excels at generating static sites in milliseconds, even for large projects, while ButterCMS serves content via fast API calls, reducing the need for database queries.
This combination results in blazing-fast page loads and optimal SEO performance, giving your site a significant edge in today's speed-critical web environment.
Flexible content architecture
Hugo and ButterCMS excel at organizing and structuring content but in complementary ways. Hugo offers powerful content organization capabilities with its front matter and flexible directory structures, allowing developers to create complex and efficient content hierarchies.
ButterCMS complements this with its custom content modeling feature, which provides a user-friendly interface for creating and managing content structures.
Together, they enable the creation of complex content architectures that are easy for marketers to manage and developers to implement, striking a perfect balance between flexibility and usability.
Streamlined development workflow
The integration between Hugo and ButterCMS significantly enhances the developer experience. Hugo provides a built-in asset pipeline, live reload functionality, and multilingual support, streamlining the development process. ButterCMS complements these features with its SDKs, webhooks, and preview environments.
This synergy results in faster development cycles and easier collaboration between developers and content creators, ultimately leading to more efficient project delivery and maintenance.
Enhanced content management for static sites
ButterCMS addresses one of the main challenges of static sites built with Hugo: the lack of a built-in CMS for non-technical users.
While Hugo provides the benefits of static site generation, it doesn't inherently offer a user-friendly interface for content management. ButterCMS fills this gap with its intuitive content creation and management interface.
As a result, marketers can update content independently, while developers maintain the benefits of a static site, creating a win-win situation for both technical and non-technical team members.
Scalable architecture
Both technologies are designed to handle growth effectively, making them an ideal pair for projects of any size.
Hugo maintains fast build times even as content grows, ensuring your site remains speedy regardless of size. ButterCMS complements this with its cloud-based infrastructure that scales to meet your needs.
The result is a future-proof solution that grows with your project without performance degradation, allowing you to focus on expansion without worrying about technical limitations.
Try Butter free for 14 days
See for yourself what makes Butter the best Hugo CMS out there. Click the button below to sign up for your free 14-day trial.
