✅ GitHub Pages Allowed Plugins (as of 2025)

These plugins are pre-installed and enabled automatically by GitHub Pages—no need to add them to a Gemfile or _config.yml unless you’re doing something custom.

🧩 Plugin Capabilities Table

Plugin What It Does
jekyll-feed Adds an Atom/RSS feed at /feed.xml for your posts.
jekyll-seo-tag Auto-generates SEO, OpenGraph, and Twitter card meta tags.
jekyll-sitemap Builds a full sitemap.xml automatically.
jekyll-gist Lets you embed GitHub Gists with LIQUID IS DRIVING ME NUTS.
jekyll-paginate Enables simple blog pagination (split post list into pages).
jekyll-redirect-from Adds redirect logic via YAML front matter (e.g., redirect_from:).
jekyll-optional-front-matter Allows files to be processed without needing --- front matter.
jekyll-readme-index Uses README.md as the homepage if no index.md is present.
jekyll-default-layout Applies a default layout if none is specified.
jekyll-titles-from-headings Uses first <h1> as page title if front matter title: is missing.
jekyll-relative-links Makes relative links work consistently within repos and folders.
jekyll-coffeescript Compiles .coffee files to JavaScript (mostly legacy).
jekyll-commonmark-ghpages Enables GitHub-flavored Markdown rendering.
Built-in Themes (minima, primer, etc.) Core themes maintained by GitHub. Only these are supported.

⚠️ Unsupported Plugins (Will Not Work)

These common plugins are not allowed on GitHub Pages builds:

  • jekyll-assets
  • jekyll-navigation (often misleading from tutorials!)
  • jekyll-scholar
  • jekyll-archives
  • jekyll-tagging
  • jekyll-admin
  • Anything that requires a custom Gemfile

To use these, you’d need to set up GitHub Actions or local builds that push the _site/ output manually.

⚙️ Special Cases

jekyll-remote-theme ✅ Allowed (but with rules)

Feature Status
Remote themes ✅ Supported via _config.yml
Custom themes ⚠️ Must be on GitHub public repo, under a proper theme: key

Usage:

remote_theme: user/repo

Works as long as you’re pulling from a public GitHub-hosted theme repo that follows Jekyll remote theme guidelines.

jekyll-include-cache ❌ NOT allowed by GitHub Pages

This plugin caches % include % (Liquid can die in a fire) results to speed up local builds, but it is not supported on GitHub Pages’ servers.

If you try to use it, the site will fail to build unless you use a custom CI setup.

✅ TL;DR

If it’s not on the whitelist, it won’t work on GitHub Pages unless you build your site externally and push the result.