Rubik: A minimal Jekyll theme template.
- Simple to use
- Free to use
- Semantic Markup
- Minimal use of Javascript and CSS
- High lighthouse scores
- High Web Vitals scores
Issues and enhancements are welcome. You can find the project board here.
❗ NOTE: This theme is not recommended for GitHub Pages hosting due to the use of Jekyll Picture Tag. (use the Starter plan from Netlify instead)
Plugins
Jekyll SEO Tag
A Jekyll plugin to add metadata tags for search engines and social networks to better index and display your site’s content.
This plugin is set up to do the following:
- Adds Page title meta tag, with site title or description appended
- Adds Page description meta tags
- Adds the canonical URL meta tags
- JSON-LD Site and post metadata
- Open Graph title metadata
- Twitter Summary Card metadata
Jekyll Feed
A Jekyll plugin to generate an Atom (RSS-like) feed of your Jekyll posts. This is a pretty stock inclusion for any Jekyll build. It allows readers to add your site to their RSS feed reader.
Jekyll Sitemap
Jekyll plugin to silently generate a sitemaps.org compliant sitemap for your Jekyll site.
Jekyll Picture Tag
The current configuration automatically builds resized .webp images for most of your image library. The settings can be found in _data/picture.yml if you’re feeling adventurous…
❗ NOTE: Jekyll Picture Tag can be a little fussy (at least, it has been for me). If you see build errors in Netlify you should ensure that your Build Image Selection is set to Ubuntu Trusty 14.04 or Ubuntu Focal 20.04 (beta).
Data files
In the _data directory you’ll find files to handle the following site components and features:
siteNavigation.yml(header navigation, footer navigation, and aside navigation)siteSocial.yml(links added here will be added to a widget in the footer)picture.yml(settings for the Jekyll Picture Tag plugin)
Contact Form
The Rubik theme has a simple HTML contact form with the Netlify data attribution. This should work out of the box if you’re using Netlify for hosting, otherwise you can replace this with your own solution.
Search functionality
We’ve implemented the solution suggested by WebJeda. The solution works well and is lightweight, but not very feature-rich.
Performance: Lighthouse and Web Vitals
Current scores for a typical post are near perfect. We lose a few SEO points on the demo site because I’ve blocked the demo from indexing. If indexing were allowed the SEO score would also be 100pts.
❗ NOTE: Posts that include iframe embeds from sources like YouTube and SoundCloud will take a performance hit.
Example:
