Personal blog website
Published: Jan 21, 2026 — Updated: Jan 22, 2026
This is my personal blog website built with Zola. It was designed to be minimalist and fast.
I previously used Hugo but decided to migrate to Zola. While Hugo is powerful, I found Zola’s single-binary approach and Tera templating engine to be more intuitive and flexible for my specific goals.
A live demo is available at thomaspais.com and the complete source code is hosted on GitHub.
If you are interested in building a similar setup, check out my guide: Build a static blog website with Zola from scratch.
Tech Stack
This website is built using the following technologies:
- Static Site Generator: Zola (Rust-based)
- Deployment & CI/CD: Netlify with custom DNS
- Math Rendering: KaTeX for high-speed client-side LaTeX processing
Core Features
- Dark/Light Mode - A theme system that respects user preferences.
- Client-SideSearch - Fast, local indexing using
elasticlunr.jsfor efficient search without relying on external services. - Responsive Design - Mobile-first design ensuring compatibility from smartphones to 4K displays.
- Performance-First - Minimalist CSS and zero unnecessary JavaScript to ensure a sub-1s load time.
- SEO - Automated sitemap generation and meta tag optimization.
I achieved a perfect score across all PageSpeed Insights categories. This ensures a seamless experience even for users on low-bandwidth connections.
Design
I focused on simplicity and readability, ensuring that the content is easily readable.
You can explore the design and features of the website by visiting this design page.
Conclusion
Overall, Zola was really easy to set up and use compared to Hugo. It’s a great choice for building simple static blog websites.
One feature that I missed was the render hooks feature of Hugo, which allows to override default rendering behavior. However, using shortcodes can achieve similar results.