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 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
• Checklist
• Project Structure
  • src
  • 11ty
• Image Optimization
• package.json Scripts
• Custom Front Matter
• CSS (Sass)
• Editor Settings
• Linting

Installation

1. Click the Use this template button.

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

3. Follow the checklist.

Checklist

The following tasks are required:

• Fill out src/_data/site.js with your site's metadata and URL.
• Update package.json with your site's info.
• Replace the favicon in src/assets/images/favicon with your site's favicon.

Optionally, you may also want to customize:

• The 11ty directory config.
• The template format and engine in .eleventy.js.
• The image shortcode.
• Any ESLint, Prettier, or Stylelint linter rules.
• Any filters, like the custom slugify function.
• Your project's style tokens, such as media query breakpoints.
• The browserslist config in package.json, for client-side bundlers.

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. Note: You will likely need to change the default image widths/dimensions used by this shortcode to match your needs.

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:

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:

• settings.json: workspace settings.
• extensions.json: recommended workspace extensions.

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:

• ESLint (.eslintrc.json) and Prettier (.prettierrc)
• Stylelint (.stylelintrc.json)

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).