How to make a website with Eleventy and NearlyFreeSpeech

2025.06.14


I’m mostly writing this to remind myself. I honestly don’t much care for NearlyFreeSpeech, as I find its copy and documentation to be terribly unclear. I can’t promise this little article of mine will be much clearer.

Eleventy is a static site generator that helps one make webpages, which one can then upload to a hosting platform like NearlyFreeSpeech via a file transfer software. This article covers:

  1. Making a basic webpage with Eleventy.
  2. Setting up NearlyFreeSpeech hosting with a custom third-party domain.
  3. Uploading your site.

1. make a webpage with eleventy

You’ll set up a basic page you can visit locally on your computer. Later, you’ll upload it to the internet.

set up eleventy

To simplify Eleventy’s documentation in a way that makes sense to me:

cd /Users/Documents/eleventy-project
npx @11ty/eleventy --serve

Eleventy should start running continuously.

make a rudimentary webpage

In the eleventy-project folder, make a plain-text Markdown file called index.md. I rather loathe Markdown, yet here I am using it.

Here’s a basic page you can put in that file:

# Hello, world.

Abolish portrait mode.

Eleventy makes (? maybe you have to make it yourself) a subfolder called _site, in which it creates the main index.html and other files that you’ll later upload to NearlyFreeSpeech.

While it’s running, Eleventy hosts the index.html file at http://localhost:8080/. Enter that into your browser’s address bar, and the browser should display your site.

When you update and save your index.md file, your site at http://localhost:8080/ should update, too.

2. set up domain and hosting

You’ll set up the place that’ll hold your site online.

connect your third-party domain to NFSN

No amount of internet searching gave me an easy answer to this, and NFSN’s documentation sure didn’t help, so I figured it out myself by trial and retrial.


It’ll take a while for HTTPS rather than HTTP to be enabled (not sure who enables it). When it is enabled, a 🔐 emoji will appear next to all three Site Names & Aliases at the top of the site information page on NFSN.

3. upload your website using FTP


To update files after editing them locally, just upload them to NFSN and overwrite their past versions.

An ambigram formed from an A and an L. It can never be upside down.

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