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Building a website from scratch can be a rewarding experience. But it can also be a long and taxing process that not everyone can afford to do.
Fortunately, Jekyll has a great catalog of popular, modern themes to choose from and customize, making your life easier â and importantly at no cost.
Jekyll is a well-established, easy-to-learn static site generator framework with an active community. Itâs also more than just a way to create a simple blog or docs. Minimal or maxed out, blog or business, documentation or design, itâs all there. The community has been working hard over the years to showcase their talent and create some amazing, free themes for many different use cases.
Many of these themes provide a number of powerful features out of the box, such as search, dark mode, and easy API integrations â all great for the age of Jamstack.
Here, we want to show some fantastic, free Jekyll themes that are popular and have seen recent development, to help you get up and running quickly.
To make your decision easier, weâve divided the themes into blogging/personal and business/professional categories, with some of their best features outlined.
Vonge is a personal portfolio site template for Jekyll, with full support for blogging. This theme also includes a full component library for website building with live editing, so you can show off your personal brand faster.
Vonge's key features:
Love Netflixâs design? Now you can have your own beautiful, responsive Jekyll theme Netflix-style site for blogging or showcasing other content.
Jekflix's key features:
From the creator of the most popular Jekyll theme out there, Minimal Mistakes, this theme aims to be your new replacement for the standard Minima theme.
Basically basic's key features:
The TeXt theme is a hugely customizable Jekyll theme option for just about any project, such as personal/team sites, blogs, or documentation. Influenced by iOS 11 style, it is visually pleasing and responsive, with a number of plugin options.
TeXt theme's key features:
For developers in need of a personal site, this is a great, flexible option. Itâs more than just a portfolio, however, with a whole showcase of other page options available.
Devlopr-Jekyll's features:
With Edition you can create beautiful documentation for your product or service. (It's how we run the CloudCannon Documentation site, and helps us structure content into categories.)
Edition's key features:
Jekyll Serif gives you all you need to get a business site up and running quickly. The creators have gone to great lengths to make a great-looking, performant site, with a clean, modern theme thatâs appropriate for many typical setups.
Jekyll Serif's key features:
On the lookout for a great-looking, flexible Jekyll theme focusing on text presentation/documentation? Chirpy might be just what you need for almost any kind of documenting need.
Chirpy's key features:
Base is a clean and simple knowledge base Jekyll template. Itâs useful for creating a site with searchable tutorials, which are organized into categories.
Base's key features:
APIs are an important part of the Jamstack model. The authors of this Jekyll theme wanted a simple solution for documenting them, without the complexity of enterprise solutions. This theme is great for getting documented quickly, focusing purely on written content.
Carte's key features:
With these amazing Jekyll themes for different needs, youâll be ready to go for your next project, or just take inspiration from expert-designed solutions.
Even if these themes arenât quite what you're looking for, there's plenty more options and updates happening in the Jekyll community â check them out on the Jekyll GitHub theme page and Jekyllâs themes page. Plus, CloudCannon also offers a number of great-looking, free and open-source Jekyll themes for lots of purposes â see CloudCannon's themes to browse them all, and deploy instantly.
Lastly, for launching your site with a favorite theme, CloudCannon is the collaborative Jekyll CMS and all-in-one platform for you to get started in just a few steps.
Give your content team full autonomy on your developer-approved tech stack with CloudCannon.
Jaimie McMahon · 3 Mar 2023