LightSpeed is a fast, simple, and privacy-respecting Jekyll theme designed for landing pages and personal websites, with built-in post support for blogging.
What is LightSpeed?
LightSpeed is a Jekyll theme that serves as both a landing page and a personal website template, including support for publishing blog posts. It runs on Jekyll, a static site generator that produces plain HTML output with no server-side dependencies. The theme was created by its author primarily to act as the template for their own personal website. It relies on several Jekyll plugins: jekyll-feed for RSS, jekyll-seo-tag for search-engine metadata, and jekyll-paginate-v2 for pagination and dynamic categories.
Key Features
- Post Support (Blog) — Includes the necessary layouts and pages to publish and display blog posts within the site.
- Pagination and Dynamic Categories — Uses the jekyll-paginate-v2 plugin to paginate post listings and automatically generate category-based archive pages.
- RSS Feed — Integrates jekyll-feed to produce an RSS feed of your posts for subscribers.
- SEO — Adds jekyll-seo-tag for generating title, description, and Open Graph metadata; the documentation notes SEO is optional and can be removed without affecting other functionality.
- Basic Mobile Support — The theme includes responsive styling so pages render acceptably on mobile viewports.
- Syntax Highlighting with Prism.js — Code blocks are highlighted using Prism.js, with instructions for customizing the theme or switching to a CDN-hosted version.
- Plausible Analytics Integration — Privacy-focused page-view analytics can be enabled through _config.yml by setting fields such as enabled, site_fqdn, and script_source, making it compatible with self-hosted Plausible instances.
Who is it for?
LightSpeed is aimed at developers who want a straightforward Jekyll-themed personal website without extra complexity. It suits Jekyll users who need a landing page with a blog and prefer a minimal, privacy-respecting setup. It also works well for those who want to customize a theme, since the CSS is adapted from Jeremy Thomas' 'Web Design in 4 Minutes' and the code is structured for easy modification.
Use cases
- Personal websites and portfolios: Set up a homepage and publish posts, with pagination and category archives for content organization.
- Privacy-conscious bloggers: Enable Plausible Analytics to track page views without handing visitor data to advertising networks.
- Jekyll starters: Use the theme as a base for a custom Jekyll site, swapping in your own styles while keeping the plugin integrations.
How does LightSpeed work?
Setup requires adding the gems jekyll, jekyll-feed, jekyll-seo-tag, and jekyll-paginate-v2 to your Gemfile, then running bundle install. The SEO tag is optional and can be removed without breaking other features. To enable analytics, edit _config.yml with a plausible block containing enabled, site_fqdn, and script_source keys.
FAQ
Does LightSpeed support a blog?
Yes. The theme includes post support and integrates jekyll-paginate-v2 for pagination and dynamic categories, so you can publish and organize blog posts.
Is LightSpeed SEO-friendly?
The theme integrates jekyll-seo-tag, which handles common SEO metadata like titles and descriptions. The documentation says SEO is optional and can be removed without affecting the rest of the theme.
What analytics does LightSpeed support?
LightSpeed includes configuration for Plausible Analytics, a privacy-respecting analytics service. You can enable it by editing the _config.yml file and providing your site's FQDN and script source, including support for self-hosted Plausible.
Can I customize the syntax highlighting?
Yes. Syntax highlighting is powered by Prism.js, and the theme documentation points to Prism's CDN usage guide for switching providers or customizing the highlighting theme.
