I haven’t (yet) nuked the main site, but I’ve spun up four or five small projects with Eleventy in the last couple months and… damn.
No database. No PHP. No Laravel-ish overhead. Just a folder of Markdown, a tiny eleventy.js config, and npm run build that finishes before I can alt-tab back to the terminal.
The numbers are kinda stupid:
A full blog with 40+ posts, syntax highlighting, lazy images, pagination, RSS, JSON feed, and a tiny search index: under 18 KB total transferred.
Build time on my 2018 MacBook: 220–350 ms.
Deploy target: literally anywhere that serves static files. That could mean free!
I was expecting “minimal but annoying,” like most static generators i've used before. Let me be clear. With many of them I gave up after a basic proof of concept (PoC). Instead I got the cleanest dev experience, and it was kind of addicting. Perhaps the most fun I’ve had since the old Jekyll days, except now the ecosystem is alive and everyone’s publishing their entire setup on GitHub like it’s 2011 again.
The community is the real flex. Half the front-end people I respect are running Eleventy blogs and just casually dropping their full config, shortcodes, and data files in public. I’ve already lifted:
Zach Leatherman’s bulletproof image shortcode
Andy Bell’s “layout soup” pattern that makes every page feel DRY without feeling clever
Stephanie Eckles’ zero-JS pagination that still feels snappy
A dozen random webmention tricks I haven’t even used yet
No premium themes, no “starter pro” upsells, just a thousand nerds proudly showing their weird little .eleventy.js files.
I keep waiting for the catch. There isn’t one.
Eleventy is the first static-site tool that actually feels like it was built by people who just want to write words and ship pixels without ceremony.
I’m not saying I’m migrating the main site tomorrow… but my side-project folder is looking suspiciously lightweight lately.
If you’ve been putting off trying it because “another static generator, who cares,” do yourself a favor and spin one up this weekend. You’ll spend more time being delighted than you will debugging.
(And yes, this post was written in Markdown, built in 180 ms, and will never phone home to a database. Fight me.)