Themes

A theme controls how your site looks and how its pages are laid out. Every site uses one theme. Switching themes changes only the presentation. Your pages, media, and structure stay exactly as they are, so it is safe to try a few.

Choosing and customizing a theme is a Pro feature. Free sites use the default theme.

The themes

• Modern is a clean, general-purpose theme, and a good default for blogs and documentation.
• Minimal strips everything back for writing that should stand on its own.
• Photographer puts images first, with layouts built for galleries and photo posts.
• Creator suits a personal site that carries your work and your writing together.
• Coach gives a service business a landing page.
• Café brings some warmth to a small business or venue.

Pick based on what you are building. For example, documentation needs sidebar navigation to be usable, a portfolio has to leave room for images, and on a blog the words should come first.

Customization

The Theme page in the dashboard controls more than the theme choice. Its cards run in this order:

• Style holds the theme itself, the primary color, and the dark mode settings.
• Typography covers the heading and body fonts, the base font size, and code syntax highlighting.
• Branding sets the site name and description, the site’s language, the icon, the logo, and the image shown when a page is shared on social media.
• Layout sets the sidebar position and the content width, and whether the header and sidebar stay pinned while scrolling.
• Sidebar controls what appears in the sidebar and in what order.
• Header and footer holds the search bar, the header links, the call-to-action button, and the footer. With the footer on, a footer label field sets the line printed at the bottom of every page. Leave it blank and the site prints the standard copyright line with the current year and your site name.
• Page content turns tags, dates, the author byline, reading time, the table of contents, breadcrumbs, next and previous links, social sharing, the newsletter signup prompt, comments, and the copy as markdown buttons on or off. Its Gallery section holds the gallery layout and download options.
• Site, at the bottom, renames the site, controls its preview address, and is where you set a default site or delete one.

You can also override the theme on an individual page, which is useful when one page should look different from the rest of the site. One theme, Coach Landing, is available only that way: it renders a page as a full-width landing page in the Coach styling.

Dark mode

Every theme has a light and a dark version. You choose whether the site defaults to light, dark, or the visitor’s system preference, and whether to show a toggle.