Which Approach Offers Better Portability: Forking or Cloning a Jekyll Theme?

Will Your Jekyll Site Still Work If You Migrate Away from GitHub Pages?

Jekyll and GitHub Pages are tightly connected, but they’re not inseparable. Many developers eventually want to move their site to another platform like Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, or even a self-hosted server. If you plan for this early, your site will be easier to migrate later.

But here’s the real question: Does your choice between forking and cloning affect how portable your Jekyll site is? In this article, we explore the consequences of both decisions from a long-term portability perspective.

What Does Portability Mean for Jekyll Projects?

Portability refers to your ability to:

• Move your site to a different hosting platform without major code changes
• Run the project locally and in CI/CD environments easily
• Customize build settings, plugins, and directory structure as needed
• Detach from GitHub Pages-specific constraints

Forked themes are often built to work *only* under GitHub Pages’ strict requirements, while cloned repositories can be restructured to run anywhere.

How Forked Themes Limit Portability

When you fork a theme originally designed for GitHub Pages, you inherit certain assumptions:

• Limited plugin support (only what GitHub Pages allows)
• Directory structure hardwired to GitHub’s deploy flow
• No external build tools (e.g., asset minifiers, image pipelines)
• Hardcoded URLs that point to GitHub domains or user pages

This makes it difficult to simply export the site to another platform without breaking internal links, layout rendering, or build dependencies.

Example Issues When Migrating a Forked Jekyll Site

• Broken relative links if baseurl is not handled dynamically
• Missing plugin functionality (e.g., search, redirects, advanced sitemap)
• No support for custom build steps unless you detach the project
• CI/CD limitations due to lack of local Gemfile or modular configs

Essentially, the theme wasn’t designed to travel — it was designed to work inside GitHub’s default box.

Why Cloning Enhances Portability

When you clone a Jekyll theme, you become the architect of your project. This means you can plan for portability from day one:

• Define all dependencies in a local Gemfile
• Use environment-specific configs (e.g., _config.production.yml)
• Set flexible URL and asset paths based on environment
• Build local preview environments to test before migration

This gives you full control to deploy your site to:

• GitHub Pages (with or without Actions)
• Netlify (via build commands)
• Cloudflare Pages (Jekyll-compatible builds)
• Render.com, Vercel, or static file hosts

Cloning Encourages Good DevOps Practices

Portability is often a side effect of good development practices. When you clone, you naturally create:

• A proper Gemfile with pinned versions
• Environment variables for site URL, author data, and analytics keys
• Separate config files per environment
• Custom build commands that work locally and remotely

All of this makes it easier to:

• Spin up a test server on Netlify for a pull request preview
• Deploy to multiple platforms without changing code
• Use build hooks for image processing, search indexing, or RSS validation

Fork vs Clone: Portability Comparison

Portability Aspect	Fork	Clone
Support for non-GitHub platforms	Limited / rigid	Flexible / adaptable
Use of full plugin ecosystem	No	Yes
CI/CD integration	Minimal	Custom pipelines supported
Local build parity with production	Rarely identical	Fully consistent
Custom deployment workflows	Manual and limited	Fully configurable

How to Make a Fork More Portable

If you started with a fork and want to migrate later, you can still fix some issues:

1. Add a Gemfile and Gemfile.lock to define your plugin versions
2. Refactor your _config.yml to support dynamic url and baseurl
3. Replace hardcoded paths with {{ site.url }}{{ site.baseurl }}
4. Test builds locally using bundle exec jekyll build

But if portability is a top priority from the beginning, starting with a cloned setup is still the best route.

Final Verdict: Cloning Wins for Portability and Migration Flexibility

Forked themes are great for short-term setups, tutorials, or proof of concept blogs — but they rarely support migration or scale. If you want your Jekyll project to evolve across platforms and time, cloning gives you the flexibility to adapt, optimize, and grow.

What’s Next?

If you’re planning to migrate your Jekyll site in the future, here are your next steps:

• Clone your current repo into a new structure with full Gemfile and configs
• Use local dev to preview your builds
• Choose a platform (e.g., Netlify or Cloudflare Pages) and test deployment
• Document your build steps in a README.md for future-proofing

Your site isn’t just code — it’s a system. And cloning gives you the power to move that system wherever and however you want.