The Bootstrap Freelancer theme is a free, MIT-licensed one-page portfolio template from Start Bootstrap, and it is perfectly fine to use, but shipping it unchanged means inheriting whatever versions of Bootstrap, jQuery, and Font Awesome it was frozen against, some of which have known vulnerabilities. The theme itself is not malicious or broken. The risk is the same one that applies to any template you copy off the internet: the dependencies came along for the ride, and they are your responsibility the moment they are on your domain.
I have reviewed a lot of sites built on Start Bootstrap templates, and the Freelancer theme is one of the most common. Here is what to check before you consider it production-ready.
What the Theme Actually Ships
Freelancer is a flat-design, single-page portfolio layout. Early releases were built on Bootstrap 3 and depended on jQuery, jQuery Easing, and Font Awesome, with all the JavaScript wired through jQuery event handlers. More recent releases moved to Bootstrap 5 and dropped the jQuery dependency entirely, which is a meaningful security improvement on its own.
That version split is the crux of the whole review. If you grabbed the theme years ago, or downloaded a fork or a tutorial copy, there is a good chance you are running the older jQuery-based build. If you pulled the current release from Start Bootstrap directly, you are likely on the Bootstrap 5 build. Knowing which one you have is step one, and you find out by looking at what the HTML actually loads:
<!-- Older, jQuery-based build -->
<script src="vendor/jquery/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script src="vendor/bootstrap/js/bootstrap.bundle.min.js"></script>
Open your vendor directory or your script tags and read the versions. That five-minute check tells you most of what you need to know.
The Outdated jQuery Problem
The specific risk in the older build is jQuery. jQuery versions before 3.5.0 are affected by two well-documented cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, CVE-2020-11022 and CVE-2020-11023, both involving how jQuery's HTML-manipulation methods handle certain crafted markup. If your Freelancer copy bundled a jQuery from that era and you never bumped it, you are serving a library with published XSS advisories.
Whether that is exploitable depends on your site. A static portfolio that never passes user input into a jQuery DOM method may not have a reachable path to the flaw. But "probably not reachable" is a bad thing to be guessing about on a live site, and the fix is trivial: update jQuery to a current 3.x release, or better, move to the Bootstrap 5 build that does not need jQuery at all. The same logic applies to the bundled Bootstrap and Font Awesome versions. Old front-end libraries accumulate advisories, and a template freezes them at whatever was current on the day it was packaged.
Subresource Integrity and CDN Loading
Many Freelancer copies, and the tutorials that teach it, load dependencies from a CDN. That is fine and often faster, but a bare CDN script tag trusts that the file at that URL never changes maliciously. If you load from a CDN, use subresource integrity so the browser refuses to run a script whose hash does not match what you expect:
<script
src="https://cdn.example.com/jquery-3.7.1.min.js"
integrity="sha384-...expectedhash..."
crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
Without the integrity attribute, a compromise of the CDN, or a typo pointing at a lookalike host, silently executes attacker code on your page. With it, a mismatch blocks execution. This is the cheapest supply chain control available to a static site, and templates almost never include it by default.
The Broader Lesson: Templates Are Dependencies
The Bootstrap Freelancer theme is a stand-in for a category. Every copied template, admin dashboard, or starter kit bundles a dependency tree you did not choose and probably did not audit. The vulnerabilities in them are not exotic; they are ordinary known-CVE issues in front-end libraries that were current when someone packaged the template and have aged since.
The practical habit is to treat a template's package.json, or its vendored script files, exactly like any other dependency manifest: enumerate what it pulls in, check those versions against known advisories, and update the outdated ones. An SCA tool will do this automatically and flag, for example, a bundled jQuery that carries a known XSS advisory transitively, which is exactly the kind of thing a manual review of a "just a free template" tends to skip. If you want the background on why front-end dependencies deserve the same scrutiny as back-end ones, our security academy covers the reasoning.
A Pre-Ship Checklist
Before the Freelancer theme goes live, do five things. Identify which build you have by reading the loaded scripts. Update any jQuery earlier than 3.5.0, or migrate to the jQuery-free Bootstrap 5 build. Bump Bootstrap and Font Awesome to current releases and re-check the layout, since major-version jumps change class names. Add subresource-integrity hashes to any CDN-loaded scripts. And run a dependency scan over the whole thing so nothing outdated slips through on the strength of "it's only a portfolio."
None of this makes the theme less usable. It just closes the gap between "downloaded a nice-looking template" and "shipped a page I am willing to put my name on."
FAQ
Is the Bootstrap Freelancer theme safe to use?
The theme itself is safe and MIT-licensed. The risk is the third-party libraries it bundles, particularly older jQuery versions with known XSS advisories. Once you update those dependencies to current releases, or use the current Bootstrap 5 build that drops jQuery, the theme is fine for production.
Which jQuery version does the Freelancer theme use?
It depends on which build you downloaded. Older releases were built on Bootstrap 3 and bundled a jQuery from that era; the current release uses Bootstrap 5 and no jQuery. Check the script tags in your copy, and update anything earlier than jQuery 3.5.0 to close the XSS advisories in that range.
Do I need to worry about front-end dependencies for a static site?
Yes. A static portfolio still runs its JavaScript in every visitor's browser, so a vulnerable front-end library is a real attack surface. The exposure is smaller than a data-handling backend, but known-CVE libraries loaded on your domain are still your responsibility to keep current.
What is subresource integrity and do I need it?
Subresource integrity adds a cryptographic hash to a script tag so the browser only runs the file if its contents match. It protects you if a CDN is compromised or you mistype a hostname. If your theme loads any dependency from a CDN, adding integrity attributes is a cheap and worthwhile control.