GitHub Pages shows your README instead of your Hugo site

You push your Hugo project to GitHub, enable Pages, and the site that comes up is your README.md – rendered as a web page, with the wrong theme and none of your content.

GitHub is processing the source branch with Jekyll instead of building Hugo. Without a generated index.html, the repository README becomes the page.

Why it happens

Pages has two very different modes:

• Deploy from a branch – GitHub processes the selected branch with Jekyll. Hugo source files are not built unless the branch already contains generated HTML.
• GitHub Actions – a workflow you supply builds the site and publishes the result. This is the mode a Hugo site wants.

If Pages serves main while that branch contains Hugo source rather than built files, it can publish the README instead of the site.

Fix: build with Actions

1. Add a workflow at .github/workflows/hugo.yml:

name: Deploy Hugo site to Pages
on:
  push:
    branches: ["main"]
  workflow_dispatch:
permissions:
  contents: read
  pages: write
  id-token: write
concurrency:
  group: "pages"
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    env:
      HUGO_VERSION: 0.148.2
    steps:
      - name: Install Hugo
        run: |
          wget -O ${{ runner.temp }}/hugo.deb https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/releases/download/v${HUGO_VERSION}/hugo_extended_${HUGO_VERSION}_linux-amd64.deb
          sudo dpkg -i ${{ runner.temp }}/hugo.deb
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          submodules: recursive
          fetch-depth: 0
      - id: pages
        uses: actions/configure-pages@v5
      - run: hugo --gc --minify --baseURL "${{ steps.pages.outputs.base_url }}/"
        env:
          HUGO_ENVIRONMENT: production
      - uses: actions/upload-pages-artifact@v3
        with:
          path: ./public
  deploy:
    needs: build
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    environment:
      name: github-pages
      url: ${{ steps.deployment.outputs.page_url }}
    steps:
      - id: deployment
        uses: actions/deploy-pages@v4

Pin HUGO_VERSION to the version you build with locally, and use the extended build if your theme compiles SCSS – most do.

2. Switch the Pages source. Open Settings → Pages → Build and deployment → Source and select GitHub Actions.

3. Push. The workflow runs on every push to main from now on.

The other way: push the built site

If you’d rather build on your own machine, push only the contents of public/ to a gh-pages branch and point Pages at that branch. Add an empty .nojekyll file at its root – otherwise Jekyll will still process the output and quietly drop every file and folder that starts with an underscore.

Use either GitHub Actions or a built gh-pages branch as the Pages source, not both.

Still the README?

• Check Settings → Pages again – the source really does reset when a repository is renamed or transferred.
• Check that the workflow run actually succeeded, under the Actions tab.
• Give it a minute. GitHub’s CDN can serve the old page briefly after a successful deploy.

In HugoKit: connecting a GitHub Pages target creates the selected workflow or branch setup and configures the matching Pages source.