jekyll SEO template - The Best Alternative to Blogging on Medium

Reduce costs on Heroku, represented by a pig image

Do you like this template? Why not use it for your blog?

You have 2 options:

1. Use a standard Pixyll template

This blog is based on a great jekyll's Pixyll template. It is free and MIT licensed.

It offers a reading experience similar to the popular Medium blogging platform.

2. Use this template for multiple SEO optimizations

I've added a bunch of SEO related features to the barebones Pixyll template and you can get it if you subscribe to my mailing list. I promise no spam and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Do you struggle to attract organic traffic to your blog?

Blog traffic increase after proper promotion
~15k unique daily visitors, partially thanks to SEO techniques
Most of the traffic is organic
Most of the traffic comes from organic Google search results


Would you like to appear at the top of Google search results?

Google search result mobile page about Rails

Or in Google's featured snippets?

Add Structured Data to appear Google featured snippets

Do you want your blog posts to attract attention when shared on social media?

Blogger's post shared on Twitter with correct SEO meta tags

Do you want your blog to be perceived as blazing fast in the eyes of the Googlebot and users?

Google speed ranking on mobile Google speed ranking on desktop
Barebones Pixyll template mobile speed score is around 75

Maybe you want to migrate your blog from Medium but still offer your visitors similar great reading experience.

Then it might be a template for you.

List of features (in addition to Pixyll)

  • Structured Data Snippets enable Google's featured snippets and Chrome's recommended articles, both valuable traffic sources
  • assets preprocessing enables you to leverage browser caching and improve Google speed rating
  • Google Speed Insight optimizations resulting in speed score around 90
  • Minified main thumb image and asynchronously loaded original version
  • Floating and responsive social share buttons
  • Disqus comments count on homepage
  • README explaining SEO features applied

You can check out this screencast for detailed info on how I release and promote my new posts using exactly the same template.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to be a developer to use this template?

You have to be familiar with HTML and CSS to use this template. If you are not sure if this is for you, try settings up some free jekyll template first to see how it works.

jekyll uses Ruby language for processing files but you don't need to know it to use this template.

Can you help me set it up?

Contact me if you need consulting on how to setup the template. I can also help you migrate your current blog.

Where can I host it?

jekyll generates a static website. I can recommend the following solutions for it:

Dokku on a custom VPS - it's the approach I use for this blog

GitHub Pages

Fastly

AWS S3

You can also serve it from your NGINX server static resources folder and easily integrate into your current homepage.

Feel free to contact me if you have other questions.

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