minimal-mistakes
:triangular_ruler: Jekyll theme for building a personal site, blog, project documentation, or portfolio.
Minimal Mistakes is a flexible Jekyll theme for building personal sites, blogs, and portfolios. It works with GitHub Pages for free hosting and comes with 11 color skins, comments, search, and analytics integrations.
Minimal Mistakes is a theme for Jekyll. Jekyll is a tool that turns plain text files into a finished website, which is a common way to run a blog or a small site without a database or a content management system behind it. A theme controls how that site looks: its layout, colors, fonts, and the reusable page structures. So Minimal Mistakes is not a website by itself, it is the visual design and set of building blocks you drop into a Jekyll project to give it a look.
The README describes it as a flexible two-column theme suited to personal sites, blogs, portfolios, and project documentation. The styling is deliberately plain so that you can customize it to your taste. It works with GitHub Pages, the free hosting service that builds Jekyll sites directly from a GitHub repository, which means you can publish a site without running your own server.
The theme ships with a long list of features. It comes in eleven color variations the README calls skins, with names like air, dark, mint, and sunrise. It offers several page layouts, including a single page, an archive index, a search page, a splash page, and a paginated home page. There are optional extras such as header images, custom sidebars, a table of contents, image galleries, related posts, breadcrumb links, and navigation lists.
It also connects to a wide range of outside services. For reader comments it supports several systems including Disqus, Discourse, utterances, and giscus. It can include Google Analytics or a privacy-focused alternative for tracking visits, and it has built-in tags to help search engines and social media previews. The interface text is translated into a large number of languages, from Arabic and Chinese to Spanish and Ukrainian.
The README notes one practical requirement: the theme depends on a caching plugin that you must install and keep listed in your configuration, otherwise the site will fail to build. The theme is packaged as a gem, the standard Ruby package format, to make installation and upgrades easier, and it is released under the MIT license.
Where it fits
- Launch a personal blog or portfolio site hosted for free on GitHub Pages using a polished, ready-made design.
- Build a project documentation site with a table of contents, search, and multiple layout options without writing CSS from scratch.
- Add comment sections, analytics, and social sharing to a static Jekyll site by enabling built-in integrations.