Switching to Eleventy

When I first set up my personal website it was powered by WordPress. It did the job for a while, but I soon found myself frustrated by the overhead and the need for constant updates. I wanted something simpler and easier to control, so I moved the site over to Jekyll. That felt like a good step at the time. Jekyll gave me a static site generator that was light, fast and far less of a burden to maintain.

After a couple of years I decided to make another change. This time I switched to Eleventy. The move has so far been a positive one. Eleventy feels more flexible than Jekyll and gives me more control over collections, templates and data without forcing me into a particular structure. I can keep things simple when I want to but also extend the build in useful ways.

One thing that has stayed constant is my choice of styling. From WordPress through to Jekyll and now Eleventy I have stuck with Tailwind. It fits well with the way I like to build websites. The utility classes keep my HTML lean and make it easy to apply consistent design decisions. I do not need to switch context into separate stylesheets or manage a heavy CSS framework. Tailwind just works.

Looking back, each change has simplified my workflow. Moving away from WordPress removed the need for a database and a server-side stack. Leaving Jekyll for Eleventy has given me more freedom to structure the site around my own content and priorities. And keeping Tailwind throughout has provided a sense of continuity. The site might have changed engines a couple of times but the way it looks and feels has remained familiar.

Eleventy

Eleventy, often written as 11ty, is a static site generator. Instead of running a live application that creates web pages every time someone visits, Eleventy builds the site in advance. It takes content written in formats such as Markdown, JSON or template languages, and turns them into plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript files. Once generated, those files can be hosted almost anywhere, from Netlify to GitHub Pages, without the need for databases or complex servers.

Eleventy vs a CMS

This approach is quite different from what most people think of as a normal content management system such as WordPress or Drupal. A traditional CMS works dynamically: whenever a visitor requests a page, the system queries a database, processes the data through templates and then delivers the result. It often comes with an administrator dashboard that allows editors to log in and make changes through a graphical interface. The trade-off is that these systems are heavier, require more resources to host, and can be more vulnerable to security issues. By contrast, Eleventy outputs static files that are already prepared and ready to serve. There is nothing to query at runtime, which makes the sites fast, lightweight and secure. The catch is that Eleventy does not come with an editor built in. If non-technical people need to manage content, you would usually add a headless CMS such as Netlify CMS or Sanity on top of it.

Eleventy vs Jekyll

Eleventy is sometimes compared to Jekyll, and for good reason: both are static site generators. Jekyll has been around longer and is written in Ruby, which made it a natural fit for GitHub Pages when static sites first became popular. Eleventy is more modern, built in JavaScript and designed with flexibility in mind. Jekyll relies mainly on the Liquid templating language, while Eleventy supports several, including Nunjucks, Liquid, Markdown and Pug. Developers often find Eleventy quicker to build with, less tied to one way of working and better suited to modern hosting platforms such as Netlify and Vercel.

In short, Eleventy is not a CMS in the traditional sense, but a tool for generating static sites. Compared with systems like WordPress, it is faster, simpler and more secure, though it lacks an editor out of the box. Compared with Jekyll, it is newer, faster and more flexible, and has become a popular choice for developers looking for a straightforward way to build static sites with modern tools.