Today I decided to moved my website over from Jekyll to 11ty. The reasons I made the switch started when I unexpectedly ran into a problem a had never encountered while using Jekyll.
I've been using Jekyll for a while now and learning it was one of the best decisions I've ever made. Jekyll was the first static site generator I learned how to use mainly because I got tired of paying hosting fees to display simple information and figured out that hosting on Github is free but requires a little. I'll always appreciate Jekyll because through the process of learning this software in order to deploy my website on Github I learned all the little details that are required when building and deploying a website from the bottom up. Before learning Jekyll I relied on various types of templating software like WordPress themes to build out my web projects, while these technologies are great they don't offer the level of customization that I was looking for.
I didn't really plan on learning how to use a new static site generator but the longer my Jekyll site was taking to load after making some edits the more I began to consider finding alternative options.
I finally decided to make the move when my laptop froze for almost an entire minute. At first I thought it was my hardware because the laptop I was using at that moment was a little older, but after running some tests on my higher performing PC's a little later I realized it wasn't a problem with my laptop at all It was the software I was using and what I was expecting from it.
Up until now I had been using Jekyll for smaller websites that focused more on design or text heavy SEO projects which is why I never ran into performance issues up until now. With my focus shifting towards creating larger projects with more code and assets I've quickly hit it's limitations.
After doing some research I learned that longer build times are a common problem when it comes to Jekyll projects especially when they contain a lot of content. One of the worst examples I read about is of a person who's Jekyll site has around 100 pages and their build time takes about a half an hour. Theirs a lot of well informed opinions in the web design forums saying that the reason "Jekyll is slow" is because Ruby on Rails, the language used to write Jekyll, is outdated, other people say file configuration plays a significantly role in build time but I couldn't really tell you anything for sure. What I can tell you is that Jekyll is a very powerful and reliable tool that's that very simple to learn but definitely has it's limitations.
My first move in choosing a new static site generator was to Google a list of the most popular ones to try and compare some of the key differences between them. Onces I became a little more familiar with some of the more popular and well established softwares I was able to dig a a little deeper and find some charts comparing build times which was my main priority because I'm going to be adding a lot of content to my website.
After narrowing my choices down to about three options based on build times I began to consider other things like if I was going to have to learn new languages or file types and after thinking about that for about 3 seconds I immeeadeitly made my decision when I realized that 11ty offered a lot of the things I already know while being JavaScript based.
One of the reasons I never considered learning another static site generators was because I thought It was going to take me a long time to learn. I was right but after fiddling around learninig nunjucks nunjucks settings 11ty is a little difficult to configure at first 11ty broke and broke but now i got it stable