TL;DR

On May 9, 2026, I switched arleo.eu from Grav (PHP CMS) to Hugo (Go static site generator) in a single session. Atomic flip (≈ 0 second downtime), 22 legacy articles migrated under /posts/ with SEO aliases to preserve Google-indexed URLs, BetterStack /ping monitoring intact throughout the operation.

The code and migration script are open source: github.com/jmrGrav/grav-to-hugo-migration.

TL;DR

arleo.eu had been running on Grav CMS for ~3 years: flat-file, PHP-FPM, ModSecurity, Cloudflare. Everything worked. But operational debt was piling up: PHP upgrades, Grav plugins to patch, TTFB creeping past 800ms on some pages.

I migrated to Hugo (Go-based static site generator) in two weeks, keeping the same URLs, the same content, and both languages FR/EN. Zero regression on SEO, Cloudflare indexing, or internal links. Here’s how.

Why Hugo

I had 3 criteria:

1. Performance — Pure static. No PHP, no DB. nginx serves pre-generated .html directly.
2. Security — Attack surface divided by 10. No more PHP-FPM, no server-side execution on public pages.
3. Clean multilingual — Hugo natively supports i18n via the index.{lang}.md convention (page bundles).

Hugo checks all the boxes. Alternatives evaluated: Eleventy (JS, but less mature i18n), Zola (Rust, awesome, but fewer themes), Gatsby (too heavy for a homelab).

⚡ In short

Connect Claude.ai to your Grav website in 30 minutes: a PHP plugin exposes 9 tools (read, create, update, delete pages, manage plugins) via JSON-RPC 2.0, a FastAPI proxy handles OAuth 2.1 authentication, and nginx bridges the internet to your server. Result: Claude can read and modify your site content directly from a conversation.

Code available on GitHub:

• 🔌 Grav plugin: jmrGrav/grav-plugin-mcp-server
• 🔐 OAuth proxy: jmrGrav/mcp-oauth-proxy

🧠 Why

Anthropic’s MCP (Model Context Protocol) allows Claude.ai to connect to external data sources via standardized tools. Until now, no MCP plugin existed for Grav CMS.

⚡ In short

Following the IndexNow plugin (Bing/Yandex), this second plugin completes the SEO pipeline by submitting modified pages directly to the Google Indexing API — with no Composer dependency, using a RS256 JWT signed in pure PHP from a Google Cloud service account.

Source code available on GitHub:

• 🔌 Plugin: jmrGrav/grav-plugin-google-indexing

🧠 Why

IndexNow covers Bing and Yandex, but Google does not support IndexNow. To notify Google instantly, you need to use its dedicated API: Google Indexing API v3.

⚡ In short

Grav has no IndexNow plugin in its official catalog. This homemade plugin fills the gap by automatically submitting modified URLs to api.indexnow.org on every page save — whether through the Grav admin or the MCP plugin — no manual intervention, no cron job, no external dependency.

Source code available on GitHub:

• 🔌 Plugin: jmrGrav/grav-plugin-indexnow

🧠 Why

IndexNow is an open protocol that instantly notifies compatible search engines (Bing, Yandex) when a page is created or modified. Without it, search engines wait for their next crawler pass — which can take hours or days.