Fifty of 2022’s most popular Hugo themes

One reason Hugo is such a popular static site generator is the ease with which you can add visually appealing themes to new and existing website projects. Maybe a responsive Hugo theme is essential to your users, or multi-language capability; maybe it’s simple contact forms or an easily adjustable dark mode. Whatever the case, the Hugo community has an option ready for you.  

If you haven’t tested out new theme templates on Hugo yet, take a minute — literally — to spin up a new Hugo site on CloudCannon, the CMS designed for your Hugo sites. With your Git account connected, you’ll be able to create a new Hugo site repo with ease, and adding a theme to a Hugo site is as straightforward as following the official Hugo documentation. (Note that some themes require a little extra config; each of the fifty themes listed below have readme files detailing what you’ll need to do.)  

When it comes to actually selecting a theme, though, you’re spoilt for choice. I’ve set out the top fifty Hugo themes below, with a little information about each of them. The most important points to note are the minimum version of Hugo they require, and how recently they have been updated. 

How I ranked Hugo themes

I’ve arranged these themes based on their GitHub stars as of the date of publication, in descending order. While I began digging through tools like Google Analytics or Semrush to uncover trends, ultimately that data was — to put it mildly — messy, and made too many assumptions about users’ intentions. Now, GitHub stars are by no means the sole arbiter of quality. As many GitHub users have pointed out, they can function as a kind of self-affirming popularity contest. Nonetheless, the star metric I’ve used for ranking themes here will reflect a range of user intentions. Personally, I use GitHub stars for three main reasons: to follow along with creators’ updates; to show my appreciation for interesting or noteworthy projects; and sometimes even just to bookmark projects to check out later.

If you’re interested in finding out more about each of these themes, I’d recommend using seladb’s StarTrack 2.4.0 to show their recent growth in GitHub stars over time. Knowing the age of a given project — as well as when it was last updated — is handy for tracking trends and making sure you’re aware of projects that are (or aren’t) actively maintained.  

With all that in mind, let’s take a look at the most starred Hugo themes.