/11ty-sass-images-seo

An 11ty starter with project scaffolding, Sass, image optimization, and SEO enhancements

Primary LanguageLiquidMIT LicenseMIT

11ty-sass-images-seo

Note

While this starter is MIT licensed, please feel free to license your website differently. The only situation where I'd ask you preserve the MIT license is if you want to create a variation/spinoff of the starter itself.

This is an opinionated starter for 11ty that includes:

  • Pre-configured 11ty directories (input, output, data, includes, layouts) and custom filters.
  • A separate directory for 11ty-specific configs: filters, shortcodes, etc.
  • Basic image optimization using the official @11ty/eleventy-img transform plugin.
  • Sass compilation, including partials for breakpoints, mixins, functions, and CSS resets.
  • Basic SEO enhancements: essential meta tags and a programmatically generated sitemap.xml and robots.txt.
  • Auto-generated favicon link tags from a single source image.
  • Convenient package.json scripts for develop, production, and linting.
  • Global configuration files (pre-commit/checkout hooks, line ending normalization, linters, VS Code settings).

This starter template does not:

  • Generate any output CSS. It only sets up basic Sass boilerplate for you to customize.
  • Make any assumptions about your build pipeline or tooling (e.g., gulp).
  • Make any assumptions about your client-side JavaScript bundler or pipeline.
  • Configure a Markdown processor (you can install markdown-it if you need it).
  • Get in your way.

Most of this template serves as the foundation for my personal website.

Table of Contents

Installation

  1. Click the Use this template button.

The header for this repo, showing various tabs and action buttons. The green Use this template button has a red focus ring around it.

  1. Install dependencies using your package manager of choice.

  2. Follow the checklist.

Checklist

The following tasks are required:

Optionally, you may also want to customize:

Project Structure

src

11ty input directory containing all of the site's files, templates, assets, etc.

  • _data: global site data.
  • _includes: partials/includes.
  • _layouts: site layouts. A default layout already exists.
  • _pages: site pages. Each page uses the default layout.
  • assets: images, fonts, CSS, etc.
  • robots.liquid: writes a robots.txt to your site.
  • sitemap.liquid: creates a basic sitemap for your site.

lib

Eleventy-specific configurations for filters, collections, general utilities, etc. Import these into your .eleventy.js to configure Eleventy. You are encouraged to write tests for any core utilities (e.g., filters).

Image Optimization

This starter includes basic image optimization using the official @11ty/eleventy-img plugin, specifically the image transform plugin. This automatically optimizes and reformats images on any HTML page, including HTML generated from Markdown content. This means that you can do this in your blog posts:

![alt text](./path/to/local/image.jpeg)

And Eleventy will replace the image with an optimized one in production.

As an optimization for local development, Eleventy will only optimize images as they are requested by your browser.

Note

You will likely need to change the default image widths and formats used by this plugin to match your needs. See .eleventy.js.

package.json Scripts

  • clean: purges the build output directory.
  • debug:html: starts 11ty in debug mode.
  • serve: serves the site's HTML and CSS in development mode.
  • build: builds the site's HTML and CSS for production.
  • lint: runs all linters to detect and fix any issues.

Custom Front Matter

Out of the box, this starter will recognize the following custom front matter variables if they are defined:

Key Type Description Default
title string Page-specific title. Used by meta title and social previews. site.title
description string Page-specific description. Used for meta description and social previews. site.description
keywords string[] Array of page-specific keywords. Used for meta keywords. site.keywords
stylesheets string[] Array of hrefs to stylesheets needed by the current page. Must be root-relative paths to the final output files (e.g., /assets/styles/**—see example in default.html). If these files are not part of your Sass build pipeline, you are responsible for passthrough-copying them. ['/assets/styles/main.css']
scripts string[] Array of module script srces to load. Must be root-relative paths to the final output files (e.g., /assets/scripts/**). You will need to output these yourself, either with passthrough copy or a bundler (esbuild, webpack, etc.). Note that module scripts are deferred by default and are safe to locate in the <head>. []
preloads { as: string; type: string; href: string; crossorigin?: boolean }[] Preload optimizations for the current page. []
openGraph.image string Path to a social preview image for the current page. If specified, the image will be used for the og:image and twitter:image meta tags.
openGraph.type string The type of web page. For articles, consider using "article". "website"
openGraph.title string An optional override for the OpenGraph preview title. Page title
openGraph.description string An optional override for the OpenGraph preview description. Page description
openGraph.twitter.card "summary"|"summary_large_image" The type of Twitter card to use. "summary"
excludeFromSitemap boolean If true, excludes the current page from the sitemap. See sitemap.liquid.
noindex boolean If true, adds a hint to the <head> to discourage search engine crawling for the page. Consider using this for tag pages and other auto-generated pages that have lots of duplicate content or content that you do not want to have indexed.

CSS (Sass)

This starter uses Sass (SCSS) to process CSS. It is preconfigured to listen for changes to Sass partials and recompile them into a main stylesheet that is then included in the default layout.

By default, this project contains partials for:

  • Tokens
  • Mixins
  • Functions

You are free to add or delete any partials you need.

Editor Settings

See the .vscode directory for configurations related to Visual Studio Code:

Feel free to delete this folder if you do not use VS Code.

Linting

This template supports linting out of the box for JavaScript and Sass to enable you to quickly build your site without worrying about syntax issues and formatting. It uses the following linters:

Relevant NPM packages:

  • eslint
  • prettier
  • eslint-config-prettier
  • eslint-plugin-prettier
  • stylelint
  • stylelint-scss
  • husky
  • lint-staged

See .vscode/settings.json for the auto-formatting rules (if you use VS Code).