Blanca

Author: Colorlib

Updated: November 2026 · v3.0.0

Credits: Images from Unsplash

Blanca is a personal blog website template for writers, travellers, home and lifestyle bloggers, built on Bootstrap 5. The layout is responsive and works in all popular web browsers. It comes with four pages: home, blog, about and contact.

The home page has a photo slider, a journal list with working search and pagination, a sidebar with an author note, recent posts and tags, and a footer with the latest posts and a photo strip. The blog page is a single article with a pull quote, two photos and a comment form, the about page tells the author’s story with a short timeline, and the contact page has a working contact form. Blanca gives you a ready-made, quiet and readable site to start writing from.

What’s new in 3.0

• Bootstrap 5.3.8 (the earlier release used Bootstrap 4.0 and jQuery), compiled from Sass with the original Bootstrap 4 proportions, and plain JavaScript with no jQuery. Swiper 14 runs the home page slider and Lucide SVG icons replace Font Awesome. npm run build (Dart Sass and esbuild) compiles one minified stylesheet and one script.
• Lighter pages: all four pages together went from 6.9 MB to 3.2 MB, and the download from 4.7 MB to 4.5 MB. Every photo has an AVIF version with the JPEG as the fallback, real dimensions, lazy loading below the slider and phone-sized crops for the slider and page headers.
• No third-party requests: Arimo and Kaushan Script are self-hosted, the social logos are a small Font Awesome Brands subset (the Twitter bird is now the X logo), and a Google Analytics 4 snippet stays commented out until you add your own ID.
• Working search and pagination: the search box filters the journal by title, tag and text and shows a result count and a clear link, and the page links switch between pages of posts. Before, the search field and the page links led nowhere.
• Working forms: the contact and comment forms send through php/send-email.php with validation, a spam trap, visible labels and an in-page message. Before, the forms had no action and unnamed fields, so nothing could be sent.
• Accessibility: a skip link and a main landmark on every page, one h1 per page, a real menu button, names on icon-only links, descriptive alt text, visible focus rings, reduced-motion support, darker greys for text on white and a dark layer behind the page-header titles.
• Demo content: new journal posts and fictional commenters replace the placeholder text, the menu links go to real pages, and every photo is replaced with an Unsplash photo credited in the README.