11ty-sass-images-seo

The four ingredients to an awesome static site.

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 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 with yarn (if you prefer another package manager, delete yarn.lock).

  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.

11ty

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. The image shortcode can be invoked with a source-relative path to your target image and any other arguments you want to supply. See ./11ty/shortcodes/image.js.

For a more advanced setup, see my tutorial on lazily loading images in Eleventy.

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 any issues.
  • lint:fix: runs all linters and auto-fixes any issues (if possible).

Custom Front Matter

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

  • title: page-specific title. Defaults to site title. Used for meta title and social previews.
  • description: page-specific description. Defaults to site keywords. Used for meta description and social previews.
  • keywords: page-specific keywords. Defaults to site keywords. Used for meta keywords.
  • stylesheets: array of hrefs to stylesheets required by the current page.
  • thumbnail: an optional 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.
  • excludeFromSitemap: if true, excludes the current page from the sitemap.
  • noindex: if true, adds a hint to the head to discourage search engine crawling for the current page.

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:

  • Breakpoints
  • 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 prototype 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).