Eleventy Kickstart Blog is a free, MIT-licensed starter template that scaffolds a blog with the Eleventy static site generator, Tailwind CSS, and Vite, aiming for production-ready performance.
What is Eleventy Kickstart Blog?
Eleventy Kickstart Blog is a starter project (a boilerplate) for creating static blogs using the Eleventy (11ty) static site generator. It accepts Markdown, EJS, and Nunjucks templates as input and produces a fully styled, static website with a built-in minimalist blog theme, SEO metadata, and pagination. The template is developed and maintained by loctran016 on GitHub, and the repository description notes it is "a starter for your 11ty project using tailwindcss, daisyui, vitejs and vercel."
Key Features
- Eleventy (11ty) static site generation — the core build system that converts templates and content into plain HTML, with live reload during development.
- Tailwind CSS with PurgeCSS — utility-first styling with automatic removal of unused CSS for smaller output files.
- DaisyUI integration — a Tailwind plugin that adds accessible UI components and a free minimalist blog theme.
- Vite module bundler — serves assets and bundles JavaScript and CSS during development and production builds.
- PostCSS processing — handles Tailwind CSS and other CSS transformations.
- Lazy image loading — uses lazysizes to defer off-screen images and improve page speed.
- Image compression via Squoosh — run
yarn minto compress images, and the template also supports lazy loading. - Prism.js syntax highlighting — highlights code blocks in blog posts.
- HTML and CSS minification — uses HTMLMinifier and cssnano to reduce production asset sizes.
- SEO and social metadata — includes Open Graph tags, JSON-LD structured data, and sitemap.xml generation.
- Quality tooling — comes with ESLint and Prettier for linting and formatting, plus a 404 page, pagination, and cache busting.
Who is it for?
- Bloggers — start a personal blog with a clean, minimalist theme and no design work needed.
- Front-end developers — get a preconfigured 11ty, Tailwind, and Vite stack with modern tooling like ESLint and Prettier.
- Agencies or freelancers — quickly spin up static client sites with SEO features, pagination, and a sitemap built in.
- Technical writers — publish docs or tutorials with code syntax highlighting and fast static output.
What can you do with it?
- Personal blogging: publish Markdown posts and get a static site with tags, pagination, and a 404 page.
- Portfolio sites: adapt the included blog theme to showcase projects, with image lazy loading and Squoosh compression for large galleries.
- Company blogs: set up a fast, SEO-friendly site with Open Graph tags and JSON-LD for richer search engine indexing.
How does it work?
The README gives a simple setup path: clone the repository, install dependencies with yarn install, and run the development server. The template includes a live reload environment, and when you're ready to ship, you can build static files and deploy them to any host, such as Vercel, which is mentioned in the repository description.
Pricing
Eleventy Kickstart Blog is free and open source under the MIT License. You can use it for personal or commercial projects without licensing fees.
Alternatives
- Eleventy Starter Boilerplate — a similar Eleventy starter that also uses Tailwind CSS.
- eleventy-with-vite — a project that helped integrate Vite into Eleventy and can be used as a reference for other Vite-based setups.
FAQ
Is Eleventy Kickstart Blog free?
Yes, the project is distributed under the MIT License, so it is free to use, modify, and deploy.
What static site generator does it use?
It uses Eleventy (11ty), a flexible static site generator that outputs plain HTML from templates and content files.
Does it support Tailwind CSS?
Yes, Tailwind CSS is integrated with PostCSS and PurgeCSS to remove unused styles, keeping the production CSS small.
Can I deploy it to Vercel?
The repository description lists Vercel as a target host, and since Eleventy produces static files, it can be deployed to Vercel or any other static hosting service.
What templating languages does it support?
It supports both EJS and Nunjucks (NJK) for templating, along with Markdown for content.
