Zero. Not Low. Zero.
The National Vulnerability Database contains zero CVE entries for Hugo. Not a small number. Not a declining number. Zero. Across the entire history of the NVD, no security vulnerability has ever been reported, confirmed, and cataloged for the Hugo static site generator. In WebPulse's June 2026 scoring cycle, this produced a perfect 100.0 security score — the first time any tracked framework has reached the theoretical maximum.
For comparison: WordPress has 18,247 cumulative CVEs. Drupal has 1,376. Joomla has 1,264. Django has 294. Laravel has 216. Even Next.js, a modern framework with strong security practices, has 92. Hugo has zero. The gap between Hugo and every other framework in the dataset is not a spectrum — it is a categorical difference.
Why Zero CVEs Is Architecturally Inevitable
Hugo is a single compiled Go binary. It reads Markdown files, applies templates, and generates static HTML. There is no runtime — when Hugo finishes building, it exits. The output is HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files served by a web server (Nginx, Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, any CDN). Hugo itself never faces the internet. It is a build tool, not a server.
Hugo has no plugin system. WordPress's 18,247 CVEs are overwhelmingly plugin and theme vulnerabilities — third-party PHP code executing with full server access. Hugo has no mechanism for third-party code execution. Templates are logic-limited by design. There is no database to inject into. There are no file upload handlers to exploit. There are no authentication systems to bypass. The attack surface is not small — it is absent.
Hugo is compiled, not interpreted. PHP, Python, and Ruby vulnerabilities often stem from the interpreter itself — deserialization flaws, type confusion, memory corruption in C extensions. Go compiles to a static binary with memory safety guarantees. Buffer overflows, use-after-free, and format string vulnerabilities — entire categories of CVEs — cannot exist in Go's memory model.
The Trade-Off
Hugo's zero CVEs are not free. They are the result of radical architectural constraints. Hugo cannot render dynamic content. It cannot process form submissions. It cannot authenticate users. It cannot query a database at request time. Every page is pre-built at deploy time. Content updates require a rebuild and redeploy. These constraints eliminate the need for server-side processing — and with it, the entire category of server-side vulnerabilities.
For websites that need dynamic functionality — user accounts, real-time data, personalized content, transaction processing — Hugo is not sufficient on its own. But the question WebPulse's data raises is different: how many of the 7.4 million WordPress sites actually need dynamic server-side processing? How many are blogs, corporate sites, portfolios, and documentation that could be static HTML? The answer, based on WebPulse's scan data, is the majority.
The Security Score in Context
Hugo's 100.0 security score exists alongside an overall score of 77.2 — not the highest. Astro leads at 84.6, Next.js at 83.8. Hugo's market trajectory score is 35.0 (low adoption growth), and its ecosystem score is 65.0 (smaller community). Hugo is not the best framework — it is the most secure framework. These are different claims, and the data supports both.
What This Means
Hugo's perfect security score is not an endorsement of Hugo specifically — it is an endorsement of the architectural pattern Hugo represents. Static site generation, compiled languages, no plugin systems, no runtime server processes. Every framework that moves in this direction — Astro's static mode, Next.js's static export, Eleventy's build-time rendering — inherits a portion of this security advantage. The frameworks moving away from it — adding server components, runtime plugins, dynamic rendering — accept a portion of the vulnerability surface that Hugo has eliminated entirely. The question for every organization is simple: how much of your web infrastructure actually needs to be dynamic?
