--- title: 'What is Eleventy?' description: 'Eleventy is a static site generator: it turns files on your computer into a finished website. Here is what it does, and what it deliberately leaves to you.' slug: 'what-is-eleventy' type: 'article' date: 2026-07-30T00:00:00.000Z lang: 'en' url: 'https://www.eleventy-baseline.dev/docs/introduction/what-is-eleventy/' --- Eleventy is a static site generator. It takes a folder of files on your computer and turns them into a finished website: plain HTML, CSS and images that you can put on any host. That is the whole idea. Everything else is detail. --- ## What a static site generator does You write your pages as Markdown or HTML. You write your layouts once. You run a command. Eleventy reads everything, puts your content into your layouts, and writes out a folder of finished pages. Nothing happens after that. There is no database, no server deciding what to show, no software to keep patched. The pages already exist, so a visitor's browser just downloads them. If you have used WordPress, the difference is where the work happens. WordPress builds the page when somebody asks for it. Eleventy builds it once, when you tell it to. That is why static sites are fast and cheap to host, and why almost nothing can go wrong at two in the morning. The trade is that a static site cannot do things that need a server. Comments, user accounts, a live search index over private data. Plenty of sites do not need any of that. --- ## Why people pick Eleventy There are a lot of static site generators. Eleventy is the one that gets chosen for a few specific reasons. **It sends no JavaScript to the browser unless you write some.** Many modern tools ship a framework runtime with every page whether the page needs it or not. Eleventy ships what you wrote and nothing else. **It does not pick your template language.** Markdown, Nunjucks, Liquid, plain HTML, JavaScript. You can mix them in one project, which sounds chaotic and turns out to be practical. **It is small enough to understand.** You can read the config file and know what your site does. That is rarer than it should be. **It stays out of the way.** Eleventy has very few opinions about how you organise a project. For an experienced developer that is freedom. --- ## What Eleventy leaves to you That last one is the part worth sitting with, because it cuts both ways. Eleventy gives you a build. It does not give you decisions. Where your files live, how your CSS and JavaScript get compiled, what goes in your ``, how images get resized, whether you have a sitemap, how a second language works: all of that is yours to arrange. Nothing there is hard. Each piece is an afternoon at most, and the answers exist in blog posts and plugin READMEs. The catch is that you make the same afternoon's worth of decisions on every new project, and you make them slightly differently each time, and six months later you cannot remember why this site does it one way and that site does it another. This is the gap. It is not a flaw in Eleventy. It is the direct cost of the flexibility that made you choose it. --- ## Where Baseline comes in Baseline makes those decisions and ships them as a plugin. Asset pipeline, image handling, head tags, sitemaps, structured data, multiple languages: already decided, already fitted together, following the conventions Eleventy already has. You install it, you write content, you get a working site. You still own the parts that make the site yours. Your layouts, your CSS, your content, your structure. Baseline does not have opinions about how your site looks or what it says. And because it is a plugin rather than a template you copy, it can be updated. A starter repo forks the day you download it and never improves again. This gets better underneath you. --- ## Do you need to learn Eleventy first? Not before you start, no. The [[quickstart | quickstart]] gets you a running site without explaining Eleventy's internals, and the [[simple-baseline-site | simple site tutorial]] walks the same ground more slowly, with the reasoning visible. Either will give you something on screen in an afternoon. You will want to learn Eleventy eventually, and you should. Baseline is built so that everything Eleventy documents still works exactly as documented: the data cascade, the template languages, the plugin API. Nothing you learn about Eleventy is wasted, and nothing Baseline does is hidden behind an abstraction you would have to unlearn. The honest version: if you have never built a site with files and a text editor before, this will be a step up from a page builder. It is a smaller step than it looks, and it is one you keep. The [official Eleventy documentation](https://www.11ty.dev/docs/) is where to go when you want the full picture. --- ## Where to go next - The [[overview | overview]] for what Baseline is and whether it is for you. - The [[quickstart | quickstart]] to get a site running. - The [[concept | concept chapter]] for the mental model once you have something working.