Ask Your AI Tool for a Hugo Site, Not a Single-Page App
Many AI builders hand you an app when you asked for a website. Say what you want in the first prompt and you get pages any host can serve.
Ask an AI tool for a website and you will often get an app. Many AI builders produce a single-page app by default: one HTML file and a bundle of JavaScript that draws each page in the visitor’s browser. Lovable’s older projects work this way, built with React and Vite. Projects started there since 13 May 2026 use TanStack Start, which renders pages on a server instead (Lovable FAQ). Neither gives you a folder of plain pages.
For an app, with logins, dashboards and data that changes by the minute, that is the right shape. For a business site, a blog or a charity’s pages, it is machinery you don’t need.
What a single-page app asks of its host
A single-page app has one real page. When someone opens /about directly, or reloads it, the host has to answer with that same index.html and leave the JavaScript to work out what to show. The host needs a rule for that. Without one, every address except the home page shows “not found” on reload.
The words also arrive late. Until the JavaScript has run, the page is empty. A browser waits for it. Most AI crawlers don’t run JavaScript at all, which is tomorrow’s post.
What a Hugo site gives you
Every page is a real HTML file at its own address. It opens directly, survives a reload and works on any host that serves files. The words are in the HTML, so anything that reads the page sees them without running code. There is no server software to patch.
A general AI chat tool or the coding assistant in your editor can write the templates and the Markdown pages for you. You still own the result: a folder of text files you can read, edit and move.
How to ask
Set the shape in the first prompt. It is much harder to turn an app into a set of pages afterwards.
- “Build this as a Hugo site, with one Markdown file per page in
content/.” - “No client-side routing. Every page should be its own HTML file.”
- “Use JavaScript only where a page needs it, such as the menu button on a phone.”
- “It should build with
hugo --minifyand nothing else.”
That last line matters on our hosting. Hugo is one of our standard frameworks: leave the build command blank and we run hugo --minify for you (build configuration). Push the folder to GitHub or GitLab, point a site at it, and it is live.
If what you need is an app, build an app. If what you need is pages people read, say so before the first line of code is written.
Yesterday’s post showed how to use the booking widget on a WordPress site.
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