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Freelance Eleventy developer

Eleventy (11ty.dev) is the tool I reach for most when a small business needs a website that loads very quickly, ranks well in search engines, and costs very little to host. I've built a good number of sites with it over the years - some brand new, plenty of them migrations off something slower - and I'm happy to take on either.

If you need something beyond a website - like a booking system or customer database - see my broader software development services.

How Chobble can help with Eleventy

Building new Eleventy sites

I'll build you a custom Eleventy site shaped around what your business actually does.

Sites I build are mobile-friendly, lean on the CSS and JavaScript, and use my custom image placeholder script so images load nicely on slow connections. RSS feeds, sitemaps and the usual SEO bits (canonical tags, meta descriptions and so on) come baked in.

You can edit content as plain Markdown files or through a simple CMS - whichever you're more comfortable with. Default collections like pages, news posts, products and galleries are pre-configured, ready to edit. There's a contact form with bot protection. You get the full source code and documentation explaining how it all fits together.

That might start from my Chobble Template or be built from scratch, depending on what you need; either way you get a website that's easy to maintain and quick to load. There's a price calculator if you'd like a rough idea of the cost.

Adding features to existing Eleventy sites

If you've already got an Eleventy site (awesome, nice choice!) then I can help improve it.

I can add new layouts and collections, build out fast image galleries, write custom shortcodes for tricky content blocks, set up a blog with tags and categories, or wire in third-party stuff like Stripe or booking systems. If your site has gotten slow I can dig in and fix it, or add little bits of vanilla JavaScript for interactivity without dragging in a whole framework.

Whatever the job, I'll fit the changes into your existing codebase without hurting Eleventy's performance.

Converting CMS sites to Eleventy

If you're stuck with an expensive, confusing, bulky or slow CMS website, I can help you migrate to Eleventy.

I've moved sites off WordPress, Wix, Squarespace and a handful of other CMSes onto Eleventy. The usual goal is to keep the design and content people are already happy with, drop the bits causing pain, and end up with something that loads faster, costs less to host, and is easier to edit.

I'll match the editing setup to how technical you actually are - some clients are happy editing Markdown directly, others want a small CMS sitting on top. Either is fine.

A real example: I recently converted A&S Home Furnishings from an expensive, broken CMS to a streamlined Eleventy site. I used wget to archive the existing site, converted the pages to Markdown with pandoc, and implemented a fresh, responsive design with minimal CSS. The new site loads instantly, has a working contact form, and costs just £10/month to host.

Switching from another generator to Eleventy

If you're using another static site generator like Jekyll or Hugo, switching to Eleventy is usually pretty straightforward. Because Eleventy is so flexible you can store files just about anywhere and it largely "just works", which makes moving from another SSG to Eleventy easier than going the other way.

I've converted a fair few sites from Jekyll to Eleventy - Buttonkin and Vegan Prestwich among them. Jekyll's good, but I got frustrated with its slow pace of development, and extending it isn't as straightforward as just writing JavaScript, so switching felt like the clear long-term choice.

Why Eleventy?

I've used a bunch of static site generators and CMS platforms over the years and Eleventy is the one I keep coming back to for small business sites. It's JavaScript, which most developers can already work with - so if I get hit by a bus, you're not stuck looking for someone who knows an obscure templating language. I run mine on Bun, which is faster and nicer to live with than npm, never mind something like Ruby gems.

It's also flexible enough that I can build whatever a client actually needs without fighting the tool. Content can live in Markdown, JSON, HTML, or come from an API - whatever fits. Most small business sites are basically brochures that rarely change, so they don't need a database and a login screen, they need to load fast and be cheap to keep online. Eleventy is great for that. My Chobble Template even handles product listings and Stripe checkouts for shops that don't need live stock tracking.

The output is plain static HTML, which means it'll keep working for as long as browsers exist, it ranks well because it loads fast, and it can be hosted for free or close to it on Bunny.net, Netlify or Cloudflare Pages. (See my SEO guides for more on the search side.)

Eleventy is becoming Build Awesome

One bit of news if you go digging: Eleventy is in the middle of a rename. Its creator, Zach Leatherman, took the project into the Font Awesome family in 2024, and the next major version - Eleventy v4 - is shipping under a new name, Build Awesome v4. It's a continuation rather than a fresh start, though: same person shepherding it, same open source project, and existing Eleventy sites, plugins and build commands are all meant to carry on working exactly as before. So if I say Eleventy and you read about Build Awesome somewhere else, they're the same thing - and none of what I've described here changes because of it.

My Eleventy approach

I build Eleventy sites with a focus on quality and sustainability:

I write semantic HTML with minimal, efficient CSS so sites load fast even on slow connections and work properly with screen readers. Everything's progressive-enhancement first - your site works without JavaScript, and any JS layer just makes things nicer when it's there. The code I hand over is something you can read and edit yourself without needing a CS degree, and every project comes with documentation explaining how the pieces fit together. You're free to maintain it yourself or take it to another developer at any point.

Everything I build runs on Eleventy

Rather than start every site from a blank page, I build on my own open-source starter, the Chobble Template, which is itself an Eleventy site - so every site I put together on top of it is Eleventy underneath, all the way down. It began as the pile of snippets I kept copying between client jobs (a news system, a contact form, header images, per-page themes) and has grown into something that covers most of what a small business actually asks for.

That includes the things you'd expect from a brochure site and a fair bit you might not: product listings with galleries, options and prices for shops; a browser-based cart with Stripe or Square checkout, or a quote-only mode where people build a basket and send it over as an enquiry instead of paying online; a menu system for cafes and restaurants with dietary flags; one-off and recurring events that publish a subscribable calendar feed; a holiday-lets system wired into freetobook; team profiles, reviews with star ratings, multi-site locations, and a news blog. If your business needs a particular thing, there's a decent chance it's already in there, and if it isn't I can add it.

Block-based pages with PagesCMS

A lot of small business sites end up looking like one long wall of text, because the editing tools don't make anything else easy. The template gets around this by giving every page a library of more than seventy pre-styled blocks you can drop in and rearrange - hero banners, two-column rows that pair text with an image, video, code sample or callout, feature grids, image card grids, stats counters, galleries, marquees of partner logos, full-bleed video and image backgrounds, calls to action, embedded products, contact forms, and plenty more. There's a full reference of every block on the template repo if you want to see the lot.

The block system plugs straight into PagesCMS, so editing a page means adding, reordering and tweaking blocks in a normal web form - no Markdown, no YAML, no code. You can build a page that opens with a hero, drops into a two-column intro with a photo, lists three things you offer as feature cards, breaks to a full-width video background with overlay text, and finishes with a contact form, without anyone going near the source files.

Because the blocks share consistent spacing, dark-mode support, scroll-reveal animations and responsive layouts, pages can look properly varied without ever looking inconsistent. And if a client needs something the existing blocks don't cover, I can add a new one without disturbing the rest of the system.

Themes you can actually mess about with

There are ten themes built in - Default, Neon, 90s Computer, Floral, Hacker, Monochrome, Ocean, Old Mac, Rainbow and Sunset - and you can run different ones on different pages if you fancy. There's a visual theme editor for changing colours, fonts, borders and spacing without writing a line of CSS, and it hands you back a file with your changes that I can drop straight in. It's genuinely good fun to play with, and it means you're not stuck with one look for the life of the site.

Prices for Eleventy development

As with all of my services, I charge a flat hourly rate for Eleventy development with transparent estimates and regular updates. I've built a price calculator which you can use to get an immediate estimate for your Eleventy site build.

Learn Eleventy yourself

Want to take control of your own Eleventy site? I offer technical training and tutoring to help you master Eleventy:

We'll cover the basics of how Eleventy turns your files into a website, writing and editing content in Markdown, adding new pages and sections as the business grows, tweaking the design and layout, and deploying updates yourself without needing to call me.

Sessions can be done in person if you're in Prestwich, or remotely, and we'll work from wherever you are now rather than a fixed curriculum.

Get in touch

Starting fresh or improving what you've already got, I'll help you build a website that's fast, cheap to run, and yours to keep. If that sounds like the right fit, fill in the form below.

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