Zap: A fast, ultra-minimal Zola theme

Ever since I went minimal with my last website theme (Inky), I've been wanting to go ultra-minimal. I wanted to see how much I could strip back to get TUI vibes: fast, lightweight with zero bloat.

This weekend I finally built Zap, an ultra-minimal theme for Zola (the wonderful Rust-based static site generator). It's designed to be as minimal as possible while still being functional: light/dark mode toggle, optional inline SVG icons via a sprite sheet, responsive images, and vibrant OKLCH colors. The entire base CSS is inlined in the HTML—no external stylesheet requests. I also replaced the old search index with Fuse.js, which generates a significantly smaller index.

Comparison showing (from left) the old Inky theme and Zap dark + light mode.

Does it live up to its name?

Perfect scores from PageSpeed Insights! 100 across the board for performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO.

Bonus: Analytics

I took the opportunity to add support for Umami analytics. It's privacy-focused and lightweight—a nice change from the usual suspects.

Looking forward to publishing more content on my shiny refreshed site in 2026!