Another free solution that may involve even less setup is Netlify's free tier, which includes 1-click HTTPS setup on a custom domain and reruns Hugo every time you push to the repo.
Moi? I love the idea of minimal. KISS is a wonderful thing.
That said, anything more and a handful of pages (and especially something blog-y) needs search. Else the UX could take on too much friction.
A couple weeks ago I saw something about a tool Facebook OS'ed for doing project documentation. I believe that was static and had search. I think. Unfortunately, I didn't go so far as to see if you could fake a (not for docs) website with it.
> That said, anything more and a handful of pages (and especially something blog-y) needs search. Else the UX could take on too much friction.
I've added search functionality to static sites before and the various JavaScript libraries available for this like lunrjs.com are super fast and easy to integrate. You can create a static search index at build time from a JSON file of your core content (probably a few 100KB compressed for many sites) and the search as you type functionality is instant which can be a better UX than other solutions.
I'm not very (I mean, at all) conversant with Javascript. So stuff like Gulp, Grunt, etc is outside my comfort zone. But one fine day, someone posts step-by-step tutorial[1] on how to set up static site search using Fuse.js on Hugo sites without Gulp, Grunt, etc., and I am finally able to set up search[2] on my Hugo generated blog in no time.
