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Tips, tricks and essentials for Jekyll as your static SaaS site

It’s no surprise that many SaaS companies choose Jekyll as their Static Site Generator of choice. Let’s go over some tip, tricks and essentials for Jekyll for your SaaS company’s website.

Photo by Fulvio Ciccolo on Unsplash

Jekyll, the legendary Static Site Generator written in Ruby, has been the favourite of developers since 2008 for its ease of use and support for templating language Liquid to quickly generate HTML pages from Markdown or other content files with added features like pagination, tags, and categories, and its vast community of developers have contributed to its vast collection of plugins and extensions for added functionalities.

So it’s no surprise that many SaaS companies choose Jekyll as their Static Site Generator of choice. It’s vast documentation, tutorials and various resources make it really easy to get started. Add the huge amount of plugins, themes and more to it and you know you can’t go wrong.

Let’s go over some tip, tricks and essentials for Jekyll for your SaaS company’s website.

Content #

Content is the most important part of your SaaS’ site. It gets the first leads in the door with your blog and it keep existing customers in with your documentation and knowledge base.

Separate collections #

Next to Jekyll’s default Posts collection, create separate collections for your documentation, changelog, and knowledge base content. This keeps them organised and provides better control over their structure and display.

Organisation #

Use Jekyll’s categories and tags to categorise and group related content within each collection. Help your leads and customers find content quicker, while helping search engines understand your content better. You can have multiple sets of categories between your collections.

Adding search is mostly important for your documentation and knowledge base. This helps customers find the answers to questions they have quicker and at the same time helps decrease the support burden.

Some search options are:

Plugins #

With Jekyll being the GOAT, there are a plethora of plugins ready to go. The plugins listed here are must-haves for every SaaS site built with Jekyll. Mostly focussed on SEO as it’s still the biggest source for successful SaaS sites.

  • jekyll-seo-tag; add metadata tags for search engines and social networks to better index and display your site’s content
  • jekyll-sitemap; silently generates a sitemaps.org compliant sitemap
  • jekyll-redirect-from; seamlessly specify multiple redirections URLs for your pages and posts (you can also use redirects-file from Netlify)

Choose a CMS #

Being able to quickly create and update your Jekyll content is a super power. There are many CMS options for Jekyll, but you’d be missing out not to check Spinal. It is used by hundreds of small SaaS companies around the world.

Written by July Forand

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