SEO & i18n

Beautiful Hugo includes comprehensive SEO support (schema.org, Open Graph, Twitter Cards) and full multilingual capabilities via Hugo’s i18n system.

Schema.org Structured Data

The theme automatically generates JSON-LD structured data for every page:

No configuration is required — the structured data is generated from your existing hugo.toml settings and page front matter. You can optionally customize the structured data output with the following params:

Custom Structured Data Params

[Params]
  organizationName = "My Company"
  organizationLogo = "https://example.com/logo.png"
  socialProfiles = ["https://twitter.com/example", "https://github.com/example"]
  alternatePageName = "My Company Blog"

Open Graph

Open Graph meta tags are generated automatically via Hugo’s built-in internal template:

<meta property="og:title" content="..." />
<meta property="og:description" content="..." />
<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
<meta property="og:image" content="..." />

The image is resolved from a cascade: share_img → image → logo.

Twitter Cards

Twitter Card meta tags use the summary_large_image card type:

<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" />
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@username" />
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="@username" />

The @site and @creator values come from Params.author.twitter.

Robots Meta Tags

Beautiful Hugo can generate <meta name="robots"> tags from three configuration layers:

1. hugo.toml — site-wide defaults (only applied to pages in mainSections)
2. _index.md — section-level overrides
3. Page front matter — per-page overrides (highest priority)

Each layer overrides matching keys from the previous one.

Boolean Tags

The following tags are supported (set to true to include them):

AI Summary Limits

The ai-summary-limit key controls how much of your page content search engines may use for AI-generated summaries:

Site-Wide Configuration

[Params.seo.robots]
  ai-summary-limit = "nosnippet"
  noindex = true
  nofollow = true

[Params.seo.GoogleBot]
  noindex = true
  ai-summary-limit = 50

This produces:

<meta name="robots" content="nosnippet, noindex, nofollow">
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex, max-snippet:50">

You can add entries for other bots (e.g. Bingbot, DuckDuckBot) the same way.

Per-Page Overrides

Override or supplement site-wide settings in any page’s front matter:

seo:
  robots:
    ai-summary-limit: none
  GoogleBot:
    noindex: false

ExpiryDate

Set ExpiryDate in front matter to add an unavailable_after directive:

---
title: Event Post
expiryDate: 2026-12-31
---

This generates:

<meta name="robots" content="unavailable_after: 2026-12-31T00:00:00+00:00" />

Description Cascade

The page description (used in meta tags and structured data) follows this cascade:

1. .Description (explicit front matter description field)
2. .Params.subtitle (the subtitle)
3. .Summary (auto-generated from content)

Multilingual Support

Beautiful Hugo supports Hugo’s standard multilingual configuration with per-language content directories.

Configuration

DefaultContentLanguage = "en"

[languages]
  [languages.en]
    title = "My Site"
    weight = 1
    contentDir = "content/en"

  [languages.fr]
    title = "Mon Site"
    weight = 2
    contentDir = "content/fr"

Language Switcher

A language switcher appears in the navbar:

• 2 languages: Inline links next to each other
• 3+ languages: Dropdown menu

Supported Languages

Beautiful Hugo ships with translations for 20 languages:

Translation Keys

The i18n files provide translations for common UI strings:

To add a new language, create a new file in i18n/ (e.g. i18n/pt.yaml for Portuguese) with translations for these keys.

Navbar Menu Translations

Navbar menu items are automatically translated when the menu entry has an identifier that matches an i18n key with the menu_ prefix. If no matching translation key exists, the menu name from hugo.toml is used as a fallback.

For example, given this menu config:

[[menu.main]]
    identifier = "blog"
    name = "Blog"
    weight = 1

[[menu.main]]
    parent = "blog"
    name = "Posts"
    identifier = "post"
    url = "post/"
    weight = 1

The theme looks up menu_blog and menu_post in the current language’s i18n file. In French (i18n/fr.yaml):

- id: menu_blog
  translation: "Blog"
- id: menu_post
  translation: "Articles"

The theme ships with pre-built translations for common menu items (blog, posts, tags, categories, archives, about, and the example-site section names). You can add your own menu_* keys to your site’s i18n overrides to translate custom menu items.

RSS

When rss = true, an RSS icon appears in the footer and alternate feed links are included in <head>:

[Params]
  rss = true

Hugo auto-generates RSS feeds at /index.xml (site-wide) and /post/index.xml (section-specific).

Analytics & Search

Google Analytics

Set the tracking ID in your config (loaded only in production):

[Services]
  [Services.googleAnalytics]
    id = "G-XXXXXXXXXX"

Piwik / Matomo

[Params]
  [Params.piwik]
    server = "analytics.example.com"
    id = 1

Google Custom Search Engine

When gcse is set, a search icon appears in the navbar that opens a search modal:

[Params]
  gcse = "012345678901234567890:abcdefghijk"

Built-in Client-Side Search

The integrated client-side search requires JSON output to function. Ensure your hugo.toml includes the following outputs configuration:

[outputs]
  home = ["HTML", "RSS", "JSON"]
  section = ["HTML", "RSS", "JSON"]
  page = ["HTML"]

Enable the built-in search UI by configuring a provider:

[Params.search]
  provider = "fuse"

Search labels come from the theme’s i18n files. To localize or customize labels, override the relevant translation keys in your site, such as searchPlaceholder, searchResultsLabel, searchNoResultsText, searchPrevText, and searchNextText.