Jekyll is a parsing engine bundled as a ruby gem used to build static websites from dynamic components such as templates, partials, liquid code, markdown, etc. Jekyll is known as “a simple, blog aware, static site generator”.

What does Jekyll do?

Jekyll is installed as a ruby gem local computer. Once installed you can call jekyll serve in the terminal in a directory and provided that directory is setup in a way jekyll expects, it will do magic stuff like parse markdown/textile files, compute categories, tags, permalinks, and construct your pages from layout templates and partials.

Once parsed, Jekyll stores the result in a self-contained static _site folder. The intention here is that you can serve all contents in this folder statically from a plain static web-server.

You can think of Jekyll as a normalish dynamic blog but rather than parsing content, templates, and tags on each request, Jekyll does this once beforehand and caches the entire website in a folder for serving statically.

Source: http://jekyllbootstrap.com/lessons/jekyll-introduction.html