I have opinions about Go web frameworks now. I did not want to have opinions. I wanted to pick something, build the thing, and move on. Instead I spent three weeks evaluating options before starting, switched frameworks once during development, and now have a production system with strong views about what worked and what did not.
This is not a benchmark post. I do not care that Fiber handles 400k requests/second in a synthetic test. I care that I can render a server-side HTML template with a dynamic nav, handle file uploads, and get useful error messages when I forget a closing brace in a template. Real usage criteria.
What I built
A cybersecurity consulting site with 1,600+ articles, full-text search via Meilisearch, a custom SEO scoring engine, PDF generation hooks, an admin interface with article CRUD, and a handful of API endpoints for search and lead capture. Server-side rendered HTML using Go's html/template. No React, no SPA. Just fast, boring HTML.
Traffic is moderate (a few thousand visits per day), but the codebase complexity is real: about 8,000 lines of Go across handlers, middleware, search integration, and a background task runner.
