25 Best Jekyll Themes for Blogs and Portfolios in 2026
A curated list of the best Jekyll themes for blogs and portfolio sites in 2026 — with live demos, star counts, and who each theme is best for.
Looking for a Jekyll theme in 2026? There are thousands on GitHub, but most are outdated, poorly maintained, or just not that good. This list covers the 25 best — tested, actively maintained, and organised by use case.
Best Jekyll Blog Themes
1. Chirpy
Stars: 7,000+ · Best for: Developer blogs
Chirpy is one of the most polished blog themes available. It comes with dark/light mode, a sidebar with categories and tags, table of contents, reading time estimates, and strong SEO out of the box. The design is clean and modern.
2. Minimal Mistakes
Stars: 12,000+ · Best for: Everything
The most versatile Jekyll theme in existence. It supports blog posts, portfolio layouts, documentation, splash pages, and a dozen pre-built skins. The documentation is exceptional. A safe choice for almost any project.
View Minimal Mistakes on JekyllHub →
3. Beautiful Jekyll
Stars: 5,700+ · Best for: Quick personal blogs
Beautiful Jekyll is designed to get you publishing in minutes. Fork the repo, edit _config.yml, and your site is live. No local setup required. One of the easiest Jekyll themes to get started with.
View Beautiful Jekyll on JekyllHub →
4. So Simple
Stars: 1,800+ · Best for: Minimal personal sites
Clean, content-focused, and fast. So Simple strips away everything that’s not essential, leaving a beautiful reading experience. By the creator of Minimal Mistakes.
5. Type on Strap
Stars: 800+ · Best for: Medium-style reading experience
A theme focused on typography and readability. Clean headers, comfortable line length, and good colour contrast. Well-suited for long-form writing.
6. Huxpro
Stars: 5,400+ · Best for: Personal brands
A full-screen hero image layout with clean post typography. Originally created by a Alibaba engineer and widely adopted for personal sites and technical blogs.
7. Contrast
Stars: 900+ · Best for: Ultra-minimal design
Dark background, light content area, excellent readability. Contrast takes minimalism seriously — no images on the homepage, just clean post listings.
8. Cayman Blog
Stars: 500+ · Best for: Simple GitHub project blogs
Based on GitHub’s Cayman theme. Clean, lightweight, and great for project documentation blogs. Easy to deploy directly from GitHub.
Best Jekyll Portfolio Themes
9. Hacker Blog
Stars: 700+ · Best for: Developer / terminal aesthetic
A dark, terminal-inspired blog theme. Monospace fonts, green-on-dark colour scheme. Stands out from the crowd — perfect for developers who want something distinctive.
View Hacker Blog on JekyllHub →
10. al-folio
Stars: 11,000+ · Best for: Academic / research portfolios
The most popular academic Jekyll theme. Features publication lists, project showcases, a CV section, and a blog. Used by researchers and professors at universities worldwide.
11. Freelancer Theme (Jekyll port)
Stars: 2,000+ · Best for: Freelancer portfolios
A one-page portfolio with a project grid, skills section, and contact form. Based on Start Bootstrap’s Freelancer template, converted to Jekyll.
12. Creative Theme
Stars: 1,200+ · Best for: Agency / studio portfolios
Bold homepage with scroll animations, a full-screen hero, and a filterable portfolio grid. Suited for design studios and creative freelancers.
13. Researcher
Stars: 600+ · Best for: Academic researchers
Ultra-minimal single-page academic theme. Designed to showcase publications, education, and research interests without distractions.
View Researcher on JekyllHub →
Best Jekyll Documentation Themes
14. Just the Docs
Stars: 8,000+ · Best for: Product documentation
The best Jekyll documentation theme. Full-text search, nested sidebar navigation, callout blocks, and excellent accessibility. Used by thousands of open-source projects.
View Just the Docs on JekyllHub →
15. Docco
Best for: Code documentation with inline comments
Renders code and comments side by side in a two-column layout. Classic documentation style popularised by CoffeeScript docs.
16. Slate
Stars: 2,000+ · Best for: API documentation
Clean documentation with a dark left-hand navigation sidebar. Popular for REST API reference documentation.
Best Minimal Jekyll Themes
17. Minima
Best for: Absolute beginners
Jekyll’s official default theme. Not glamorous, but very clean and a great learning base. Every Jekyll installation starts with Minima.
18. Whiteglass
Stars: 400+ · Best for: Long-form writing
Inspired by Medium’s reading experience. Wide margins, large body text, excellent reading comfort. Great for writers.
19. Pixyll
Stars: 1,800+ · Best for: Photography and minimal portfolios
Designed to put images front and centre. Clean whitespace, big typography, and a focus on visual content.
20. Swiss
Best for: Type-focused minimalism
Based on the Swiss/International Typographic Style (think IKEA design language). Strong grid, clean typography, neutral palette.
Best Dark Jekyll Themes
21. Devlopr Jekyll
Stars: 2,500+ · Best for: Developer blogs with dark mode
Feature-rich developer blog theme with dark mode, reading time, newsletter signup, post categories, and Google Analytics. One of the most complete free themes available.
22. Klise
Stars: 1,300+ · Best for: Clean dark design
A dark, minimal blog theme with excellent typography. Auto dark/light mode based on system preference. Clean and fast.
23. Jasper2
Stars: 900+ · Best for: Magazine-style dark blogs
Inspired by Ghost’s Casper theme. Full-screen hero images, card-based post grid, and a polished magazine feel. Dark mode built in.
Best Jekyll Themes for Businesses
24. Agency Jekyll Theme
Stars: 1,000+ · Best for: Marketing agencies
Multi-section one-page theme with services, team, portfolio, and contact sections. Clean corporate design.
25. Massively
Stars: 700+ · Best for: Bold graphic design portfolios
Big typography, strong visual hierarchy, full-width background images. Makes a strong first impression. Ported from HTML5 UP.
How to Choose
For a personal blog: Start with Chirpy or Minimal Mistakes — both have excellent documentation and are actively maintained.
For a portfolio: al-folio (academic) or Freelancer (creative) depending on your field.
For documentation: Just the Docs, no contest.
For something distinctive: Hacker Blog or Massively — they stand out visually.
For the fastest start: Beautiful Jekyll — fork and go.
All themes listed here are available with live demos on JekyllHub. Filter by category, style, or features to find your perfect match.
What separates a great Jekyll theme from a mediocre one
With hundreds of Jekyll themes available, knowing what to look for saves hours of trial and error. The obvious criteria — visual design, colour palette, layout options — matter, but they are easier to assess than the less visible qualities that determine whether a theme is actually pleasant to work with.
Maintenance status is the first filter. A theme that has not been updated in two years may have Liquid template syntax incompatible with the current Jekyll version, dependency conflicts with recent Ruby gem versions, or security issues in bundled JavaScript libraries. Check the GitHub repository’s last commit date, the Issues tab for unresolved reports of build errors, and the Releases tab for a changelog that signals active development. A theme maintained by someone who uses it for their own site tends to stay current; an abandoned theme created as a one-time project may not.
Documentation quality predicts your customisation experience. A theme with a README that lists only installation steps leaves you reverse-engineering Liquid templates to understand how to customise navigation, add author information, or configure the homepage. A theme with a dedicated documentation site, annotated configuration file, and example overrides reduces customisation time from days to hours. Minimal Mistakes’s documentation is the gold standard — every configuration option is explained with examples, and the FAQ covers the questions most users actually have.
Test a theme’s performance before committing to it. Run the demo through Google’s PageSpeed Insights or WebPageTest. Themes that bundle large JavaScript libraries, load web fonts uncritically, or embed third-party analytics and tracking scripts can produce Core Web Vitals failures even before you add any content. A theme that scores 90+ in PageSpeed out of the box gives you a performance budget to work with; a theme that starts at 65 means you will be spending time debugging Cumulative Layout Shift and Largest Contentful Paint before you even start writing.
Portfolio themes: specific features to look for
Portfolio themes have requirements distinct from standard blog themes. The core feature is a project gallery — a grid of project cards with cover images, titles, and links to individual project pages. The gallery should be filterable by category (design, development, photography, writing) without a page reload, typically via a JavaScript filter on data attributes.
Individual project pages need more than just text content. Look for themes that support a gallery of project images, a client or role field, a technology stack display, a live demo link, and a case study narrative structure. These fields should be driven by front matter, not hard-coded in templates, so you can populate them from Markdown files.
Inquiry or contact functionality is often the goal of a portfolio — you want potential clients or employers to contact you after seeing your work. A dedicated contact page with a form (integrated with Formspree, Netlify Forms, or similar) should be part of the theme. Resume or CV integration — a page that formats your work history from data files — adds professional credibility without requiring a separate PDF link.
Social proof features vary widely between themes. Client testimonials, logos of companies you have worked with, and a dedicated “As featured in” section all support the goal of establishing credibility. These are particularly important for freelancers and consultants whose portfolio competes with agencies. If a theme does not include these features, adding them via custom includes is straightforward, but starting with a theme that has them saves time.
Blog themes: what actually matters for readers
Blog themes live or die on reading experience. The feature list — dark mode, tags, search, social share — matters less than whether the core reading experience is comfortable and distraction-free.
Typography is the foundation of reading experience. Measure (line length) should be 65-75 characters for body text — shorter than most theme defaults. Line height should be 1.6-1.75 for body text. Font size should be a minimum of 16px; 18-20px is increasingly standard and appropriate for long-form reading. A theme that gets these three variables right is readable even if everything else is ordinary.
Loading performance on mobile directly affects how many readers finish articles. A blog post that takes 4 seconds to load on a 4G connection loses a significant fraction of readers before the text appears. Check theme performance on mobile using WebPageTest with a mobile profile — a theme that loads in under 2 seconds on mobile is hitting the right performance budget.
Navigation to related content keeps readers on your site. Breadcrumbs (showing the category hierarchy), a clearly visible tag system that links to other posts in the same category, and a “related posts” section at the end of each article all serve this function. Some themes implement all three; others provide none. Consider how readers discover your other content once they finish an article, and choose a theme whose structure supports that journey.
Using JekyllHub’s theme directory effectively
The JekyllHub theme directory lists themes across categories — Blog, Portfolio, Documentation, E-commerce, Landing Page, and more — with live demo links, GitHub statistics, and compatibility information for each theme. Use the demo link before reading documentation: if the demo does not impress you visually, no amount of good documentation will make it the right choice for your site.
Filter by stars to surface themes with established user bases. A theme with 2,000+ GitHub stars has been tested by hundreds of users across many environments — edge cases have been reported and fixed, installation issues have been documented, and the template code has been reviewed by many eyes. A theme with 15 stars may be excellent or may have critical issues nobody has discovered yet.
The Documentation filter helps when you need strong customisation support. If you plan to significantly modify a theme, prioritise themes tagged as well-documented over themes that are merely visually appealing. The best-documented themes — Minimal Mistakes, Just the Docs, Chirpy — have made customisation the product, not an afterthought.