Jekyll Reviews & Insights

At my organization, we currently use Jekyll on my team as an easy way to publish our style guide and pattern library. The Jekyll site gets deployed automatically through GitHub pages. I use Jekyll personally for a portfolio website, also deployed through GitHub Pages. I also have used Netlify for publishing Jekyll sites in the past.

Jekyll is well suited for users who would like to have all content within source control (Git) along with the code used to produce the website. Because everything it produces is static assets (HTML, CSS, etc.), sites created with Jekyll are super fast, with very little needed on the server side of things. There are also a few really great free solutions for deploying and serving Jekyll websites.

Jekyll will be tough to maintain for users who are not web developers, comfortable using Git to update content. There are 3rd party solutions for maintaining Jekyll-based sites without having to touch the code, but this will cost extra money. Also, because there is no server-side language, you will need to look elsewhere to handle things like contact forms.

We use Jekyll as a basic content management system framework for building basic, static, (and mostly freely hosted) websites. Generally the websites are either small prototypes, landing pages for new products or something new we're launching, or even as a basic blogging platform for one of our community driven technology sites. Jekyll helps you get up and running very quickly with a bare bones blog enabled site.

Jekyll is perfect for building MVP websites as a way to prototype new projects, products, or landing pages. It is also great for technically savvy individuals who want to start a personal blog or portfolio website without dealing with the security of a server or databases. It can be challenging to pick up, but is very effective when you need it.

I used Jekyll at two previous organizations. The first was a non-profit college where I used Jekyll to keep costs down. The second was a small web development firm where I used Jekyll to speed development of the company's portfolio website. Jekyll is great for both purposes. Jekyll allowed me to keep costs low for the college I worked for by hosting it for free on GitHub.com along with a custom domain. Jekyll allowed me to speed development at the web firm by allowing me to work very close to the front-end technologies I'm expert in, without having to fiddle with other people's layers in between. The other advantage we reaped at the web firm was how easy it is to build a screaming-fast Jekyll website, since the entire site ends up as a static site, which is great for a website meant to show off your web development skill.

Jekyll is great for people who aren't intimidated by editing HTML, CSS, and Markdown files, people who are on a shoestring budget, and people who want a blazing fast website. Jekyll may not be the best option for people who aren't interested in editing their websites in a text file and would rather have a WordPress-esque back-end from the beginning.

Jekyll is used as the static site generator for project documentation, user guides, and developer best practices explanations. We're using it both through GitHub's built-in Pages feature (which compiles Jekyll sites for us automatically) and locally for content and design staging before anything ever ships to production. Jekyll allows us to work on the content of a documentation site independent of the code that builds and hosts the content.

Jekyll is very well-suited for static content that changes infrequently once it's been published. If the site is a blog or needs to generate dynamic content in response to requests (i.e. form builders or other dynamically-generated pages) a more interactive system would be preferable. Jekyll works best with a hosted solution like GitHub Pages or Elastic Beanstalk or something else where code/content can be deployed once, quickly, and left alone.