Eleventy (11ty)

A lightweight, Node.js-based static-site-generator that compiles template files into pre-rendered HTML in a _site/ folder, without requiring a JS framework. Summary drawn from its homepage (our source).

Design philosophy

Simplicity / zero-config: sensible defaults, no config required, extensible when needed.
Doesn't hold content hostage: no custom content format; easy migration.
Doesn't inject its own markup into pages — author keeps full control of the HTML.
Progressive enhancement over framework dependency; template languages are decoupled from the tool.

Differentiators

13+ template syntaxes in one project: HTML, Markdown, Liquid, Nunjucks, JavaScript, TypeScript, WebC, and more — vs. competitors locked to one ecosystem.

Performance

Builds 4,000 Markdown files in 1.93s — per its benchmark, ~12× faster than astro and ~37× faster than Next.js. (Build-time speed; a different axis from astro's runtime core-web-vitals claim.)

Adoption

Powers sites for NASA, CERN, W3C, Google, Mozilla, Microsoft. ~18.6M downloads, ~19,700 GitHub stars (figures as read 2026-05-30). Listed in awesome-static-generators as the "simpler static site generator."

Re-verified 2026-08-04 (staleness queue)

Homepage re-read at 66 days past window. Two things changed, and one of them is not a version bump.

Version. Stable is v3.1.6, with v4.0.0-alpha.10 on the canary channel — so a major version is in pre-release. The v3.1.0 release (May 2025) advertised "11% faster and 22% smaller."

It has been rebranded: "Eleventy is now Build Awesome" — the project now sits under Font Awesome's umbrella, with a Build Awesome Pro tier and sponsorship programme alongside it. That is a governance and funding change, not a technical one, and it matters to this spoke's standing question about who pays for a build tool. Recorded here; the synthesis question it bears on is left for a source that covers the move directly rather than a homepage banner.

Stability claim, unchanged and now with a number: 226 releases since December 2017, of which only three required developer changes. That is the strongest version of the low-churn argument this page has been making, and it is the project's own count.

The design philosophy, differentiators and build-speed figures above were re-read and stand as written.

Re-verified 2026-10-04 (staleness queue)

Homepage re-read. Stable is still v3.1.6 and canary still v4.0.0-alpha.10, so the v4 line has not moved in two months. The footer says the site itself is built with "Eleventy v4.0.0", which reads as the project running its own pre-release, not as a v4 release. The 226-releases, three-breaking figure is unchanged. One new number: the homepage thanks 838 backers of Build Awesome Pro, the first count this page has for the funding model the rebrand introduced.

Page performance, hunted 2026-09-02

The build-speed figures above are the ones Eleventy publishes, and it turns out they are nearly the only ones. Its /docs/performance/ page never mentions Core Web Vitals, LCP, CLS or INP (eleventy-performance-docs) — "performance" there means build performance, and all eight of its recommendations are about making the build faster.

The runtime claim is one sentence and it is architectural: "by-default we do not include any costly runtime JavaScript bundles that often hamper site performance." The real page-metric lever is the Image plugin, which adds width and height "to reduce layout shift" and emits AVIF/WebP with srcset — and even that is documented under build cost ("+1 Build Cost" for AVIF), with its caching pitched as faster builds. So Eleventy improves these metrics by default rather than by instruction, which is why no first-party guide to improving them exists.

What the community measures instead is speedlify: 1,145 sites, weekly, median Lighthouse performance 98. Strong — and a lab number. Only 118 of those sites have CrUX field data, so Eleventy has no field pass rate comparable to Astro's 66%; see core-web-vitals.