Gray

Gray is a minimal single-column Jekyll theme for building fast, lightweight personal websites, blogs, and portfolios, with a total theme weight under 3kb.

What is Gray?

Gray is a single-column blog and portfolio theme built for Jekyll, the Ruby-based static site generator. It takes Jekyll content written in Markdown and produces a fully static website with portfolio, blog, and tag pages. The theme is distributed as a Jekyll theme repository and demoed at gray-jekyll.netlify.com. Repository metadata indicates 27 stars on GitHub.

Key Features

• SEO optimized — Structurally valid markup that follows search engine best practices out of the box.
• Ultra-lightweight — The entire theme weighs under 3kb, contributing to fast page loads.
• AAA performance scores — Reports 100/100 on Lighthouse, Gmetrix, and Webpagetest performance audits.
• Portfolio/blog/tag pages — Built-in layouts for a portfolio, a blog, and tagging system.
• Responsive design — Adapts to mobile and desktop viewports without extra JavaScript.
• Inline and compressed CSS — Styles are inlined and the HTML and CSS are minified to reduce requests.
• SEO extras — Includes sitemap.xml, robots.txt, Atom feed, and JSON feed for syndication.
• HTTP security headers — Ships with recommended security headers for better browser protection.

Who is it for?

• Personal bloggers who want a clean, fast, and easy-to-maintain Jekyll blog with zero dependencies beyond Jekyll itself.
• Freelance designers and developers who need a portfolio that shows their work with tag-based organization.
• Performance-focused site owners who want a theme that scores a perfect 100 on page speed audits and keeps bandwidth minimal.

What can you do with Gray?

• Create a portfolio — Use the portfolio layout to display projects, with tags to categorize them.
• Publish a blog — Write posts in Markdown and have them auto-generate into the blog page, with an Atom and JSON feed for subscribers.
• Setup a tag-based navigation — Use built-in tag pages to let readers filter your content by topic.

Alternatives

• Minima — the default Jekyll theme, also minimal and blog-focused, making it a direct alternative to Gray.

FAQ

Does Gray include a static site generator?

No, Gray is a theme for Jekyll, which is a separate static site generator. You build your site with Jekyll and apply Gray as the theme.

Is Gray responsive?

Yes, Gray is designed to be responsive, meaning it adapts to different screen sizes such as phones, tablets, and desktops.

Does Gray have an RSS feed?

Yes, Gray includes both an Atom feed and a JSON feed, making it easy for readers to subscribe to your content.