Hugo, SEO and Minification

It’s been a long time since I’ve had to worry about SEO so I first checked google and came across keithp’s blog post about hugo seo. With a few edits (hugo moves fast) I was able to use his partial and it worked well enough to get my descriptions updated on the google search index.

In early August Hugo released version 0.47 which added a handy --minify cli flag that minifies the final rendered output. It worked really well and nearly my entire site was stripped down to just a few (very) long lines – except for the SEO template.

I solved this problem by reworking the seo partial to create a Map and output it as json.

{{- $title := .Site.Title }}
{{- if not .IsHome }}
  {{- $title = .Title }}
{{- end }}

{{- $author := dict "@type" "Person" "name" .Site.Params.Author }}

{{- $logo := dict "@type" "ImageObject" "url" .Site.Params.PublisherLogo "width" 60 "height" 60 }}
{{- $publisher := dict "@type" "Organization" "name" .Site.Params.Publisher "logo" $logo }}

{{- with or (index (.Resources.Match "thumb.*") 0) (index (.Resources.ByType "image") 0) }}
  {{- $image := .Permalink }}
{{- end }}

{{- $keywords := slice "Blog" }}
{{- if isset .Params "tags" }}
  {{- $keywords = union .Params.tags $keywords }}
{{- end }}

{{- $scratch := newScratch }}
{{- $scratch.SetInMap "seo" "@context" "http://schema.org" }}
{{- $scratch.SetInMap "seo" "@type"    "BlogPosting" }}
{{- $scratch.SetInMap "seo" "mainEntityOfPage" (dict "@type" "WebPage" "@id" .Site.BaseURL) }}
{{- $scratch.SetInMap "seo" "articleSection"   .Section }}

{{- $scratch.SetInMap "seo" "name"     $title }}
{{- $scratch.SetInMap "seo" "headline" $title }}

{{- $scratch.SetInMap "seo" "description" (.Description | default .Site.Params.Description) }}
{{- $scratch.SetInMap "seo" "inLanguage"  .Site.LanguageCode }}

{{- $scratch.SetInMap "seo" "author"  $author }}
{{- $scratch.SetInMap "seo" "creator" $author }}
{{- $scratch.SetInMap "seo" "accountablePerson" $author }}
{{- $scratch.SetInMap "seo" "copyrightHolder"   $author }}

{{- $scratch.SetInMap "seo" "datePublished" .Date }}
{{- $scratch.SetInMap "seo" "dateModified"  .Date }}
{{- $scratch.SetInMap "seo" "copyrightYear" (.Date.Format "2006") }}

{{- $scratch.SetInMap "seo" "publisher" $publisher }}

{{- with or (index (.Resources.Match "thumb.*") 0) (index (.Resources.ByType "image") 0) }}
  {{- $scratch.SetInMap "seo" "image" .Permalink }}
{{- end }}

{{- $scratch.SetInMap "seo" "url" .Permalink }}

{{- $scratch.SetInMap "seo" "wordCount" .WordCount }}
{{- $scratch.SetInMap "seo" "keywords"  $keywords }}

<script type="application/ld+json">{{ $scratch.Get "seo" | jsonify }}</script>

Which is a reasonable solution but in my post on hugo discourse, @bep directed me toward this regex that permits js sub-tags to be minified. This gave me the idea to alter this to allow ld+json tags to be minified as json.

I was able to make a pull-request into the Hugo repository: Make JSON minification more generic. Along the way I noticed that the js minifier regex was woefully untested so I revamped the minifiers_test.go to better test minification of different main and sub-types.


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