Templates
Academic website templates: live demos you can click, and code you can fork
"Academic website template" means two different things, and the pages ranking for it rarely admit which one they're selling. The first meaning is a code template — a repository you fork, edit in Markdown, and host yourself, free. The second is a live starting point— a working site you open, click through, and make yours in a hosted editor. Both are legitimate; they suit different people. This page covers both, in that order — including five live demo portfolios you can click through right now, and the free code templates we would genuinely recommend if you'd rather own the whole stack.
Facts and prices below were checked on the linked project and vendor pages on July 30, 2026. Spotted something outdated? Tell us: support@scilio.app.
Live templates you can click, by field
A screenshot tells you what a template looked like once, on someone else's content. A live site tells you how it reads, how publications sit on the page, and what your own work would feel like in it. So instead of screenshots, here are five complete demo portfolios — one per field and career stage. The personas are fictional and their photos are AI-generated; the portfolios are real, built with Scilio (that's us), and every one of them can be switched between all twenty portfolio themes, so the field-to-theme pairings below are starting points, not rules.
Physics — undergraduate →
Liam Bennett (fictional): publications and projects from a physics student's first research steps, in the Default theme.
Look at how little content a credible portfolio actually needs.
Marine ecology — postdoc →
Dr. Ilaria Bentes (fictional): heatwave-recovery research with field projects and citizen science, in the Marine theme.
Look at how project pages carry fieldwork.
Computational linguistics — PhD candidate →
Tomás Aldana (fictional): low-resource language technology with a code-heavy project list, in the Editor theme.
Look at how code-adjacent work is presented without a repo dump.
Neuroscience — professor →
Prof. Ingrid Vasseur (fictional): a full faculty publication record, including a labeled preprint, in the Serif theme.
Look at how a long publication list stays scannable.
Glaciology — mid-career researcher →
Dr. Aksel Rande (fictional): ice-core and monitoring research with outreach projects, in the Glacier theme.
Look at how outreach sits beside research without diluting it.
If you'd rather see real researchers' sites than demos, we keep an annotated collection of real academic website examples — none affiliated with us, several on competitor platforms.
Free code templates — fork it and own everything
If you're comfortable with Git and Markdown, the free templates below are excellent, and we'd be lying if we pretended otherwise. You own the code, the hosting is free on GitHub Pages, and nobody can raise the price on you.
al-folio
Jekyll, free on GitHub Pages · github.com/alshedivat/al-folio
The standard-bearer: an MIT-licensed Jekyll starter with 15.9k GitHub stars and 13.1k forks, actively maintained by four core maintainers. Its killer feature is automated publication pages generated straight from a BibTeX file — export from your reference manager, commit, done. It also supports lab and group pages, math typesetting, dark mode, and CV generation.
Academic Pages
Jekyll, free on GitHub Pages · academicpages.github.io
The fork-and-edit veteran, extended from the Minimal Mistakes Jekyll theme with dedicated sections for publications, talks, teaching, and a dynamically generated CV. Setup is six documented steps — register a GitHub account, fork, rename, configure, upload, verify — and you can edit everything in GitHub's web interface without ever installing Git locally. It expects comfort with Markdown and YAML front matter.
Quarto academic templates
Quarto, free on GitHub Pages · drganghe.github.io/quarto-academic-site-examples
Suits researchers already living in the R or Python ecosystem: one template family covers personal sites, lab sites, courses, and events, and the community around it has worked out patterns for automating publication listings from spreadsheets. If your papers are born in Quarto notebooks anyway, this is the path of least friction. One community tip worth repeating: fork the dedicated template, not someone's live site — authors get notified otherwise.
The honest fine print, because an honest comparison cuts both ways: "free" here is paid in maintenance. Jekyll means a Ruby toolchain and dependency updates; a customized theme can make updating painful; and your publication list is only as current as your last commit. None of that is a reason to avoid these templates — it is the price tag, stated where the price tag should be.
Paid marketplace and builder templates
ThemeForest lists 175 templates under "academic," but read the inventory before reaching for a card: much of it is university sites, learning-management systems, and admin dashboards. The slice relevant to an individual academic — personal CVs, portfolio themes, research-site templates — mostly runs $5–$17 for HTML templates and $19–$49 for WordPress themes. You still assemble hosting, updates, and plugins yourself.
There are also template galleries inside general-purpose builders — Wix and Google Sites both offer academic-flavored starting points. If that's the direction you're leaning, the real question isn't the template, it's the platform — and we've compared those properly in our guide to academic website builders and your no-code options.
How to choose
A template nobody maintains is a diary with a domain name. So choose by maintenance appetite first, aesthetics second:
You want full control and BibTeX-driven publications, and Git doesn't scare you — fork al-folio. It does two things Scilio doesn't do today: import publications from BibTeX, and publish for free.
You want free hosting with the gentlest possible code path — Academic Pages, edited entirely in the browser.
Your research already lives in R or Python notebooks — Quarto.
You want a designed WordPress site and don't mind assembling hosting — the ThemeForest lane, eyes open about the institutional clutter.
You want to start from something working, today, without a toolchain — open one of the live demos above and build in a hosted editor. That's the lane we build for.
If you're still a step earlier — not sure what belongs on an academic website at all — start with our guide on how to make an academic website, step by step and come back to templates once you know what yours needs to hold.
Start from a live template
Every demo above is a real, working portfolio — open one, click around, and if the shape fits, build your own from it. The editor is free to use; you pay only when you publish. No toolchain, no YAML, and your publication list won't wait for your next commit.