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 — and importantly at no cost. Jekyll is equally helpful for students learning how to create sites with Ruby and web agencies or businesses wanting a tried-and-tested framework.

Free Jekyll themes Direct link to this section

Jekyll is a well-established, easy-to-learn static site generator framework with an active community. It’s also more than just a way to create a simple blog or docs. Minimal or maxed out, blog or business, documentation or design, it’s 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 — all great for the age of the Headless CMS.

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, we’ve divided the themes into blogging/personal and business/professional categories, with some of their best features outlined. We've also included direct links to themes' GitHub repositories where possible.

Jekyll blog themes Direct link to this section

1. Vonge theme Direct link to this section

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:

• Fully configurable, with component library for page building
• Testimonials and portfolios
• Optimized for editing in CloudCannon
• Deploy to CloudCannon with one click

2. Jekflix theme Direct link to this section

Love Netflix’s design? Now you can have your own beautiful, responsive Jekyll theme Netflix-style site for blogging or showcasing other content.

Jekflix's key features:

• Built-in live search and SEO
• Estimated reading time and reading progress
• Lazy-loaded images for best performance

3. Basically Basic theme Direct link to this section

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:

• Modern, responsive design with six color variations (skins)
• Built-in search options and easy SEO
• Resume/CV layout ready to go

4. TeXt theme Direct link to this section

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:

• Six responsive skins, built with semantic HTML for accessibility
• Enhancements for multiple media types, math, diagrams, and charts
• Built-in search and multiple plugin options

5. Devlopr-Jekyll theme Direct link to this section

For developers in need of a personal site, this is a great, flexible option. It’s more than just a portfolio, however, with a whole showcase of other page options available.

Devlopr-Jekyll's features:

• Built-in real-time search and dark-mode toggle
• Local admin built in with Jekyll Admin
• Multiple API, hosting, and code-related options

Jekyll professional themes Direct link to this section

1. Dante theme Direct link to this section

Dante is a modern agency template for Jekyll, optimized and configured for CloudCannon's live visual editing and component-based page-building.

Dante's key features:

• Staff and author system
• Pre-built and pre-styled components
• Optimized for live editing in CloudCannon
• Deploy to CloudCannon with one click

2. Jekyll Serif theme Direct link to this section

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 that’s appropriate for many typical setups.

Jekyll Serif's key features:

• Responsive, with 100% Lighthouse score in all categories
• Minimal size for maximum UX, with under 80kb including all assets
• Great aesthetics with royalty-free illustrations and content

3. Chirpy theme Direct link to this section

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:

• Minimal and responsive, with great sidebar
• Built-in search and dark mode
• Syntax highlighting and math presentation

4. Justice theme Direct link to this section

Justice is a clean and simple business-themed Jekyll template. It’s useful for creating static marketing pages that perform reliably for SEO.

Justice's key features:

• Pre-built and pre-styled components
• Dark mode
• Contact form
• Blog and post category pages
• Optimized for editing in CloudCannon
• Deploy to CloudCannon in one click

5. Carte theme Direct link to this section

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:

• All static, no server, inspired by Swagger and I/O docs
• Customizable boilerplate with simple, responsive design
• Easy to add new API calls via _posts, not POST

Wrap-up Direct link to this section

With these amazing Jekyll themes for different needs, you’ll be ready to go for your next project — or you can just take inspiration from expert-designed solutions and adapt them for your own needs!

And even if these themes aren’t quite what you're looking for, there are plenty more options and updates happening in the Jekyll community — check them out on the Jekyll GitHub theme page and Jekyll’s themes page. Plus, CloudCannon also offers a number of great-looking, free and open-source Jekyll themes for lots of purposes — see CloudCannon's themes to browse them all, and deploy instantly.

Once you've chosen your favorite theme, bring it to CloudCannon — the collaborative Jekyll CMS and all-in-one platform for you to get started in just a few steps.