Building a Blazing Fast JAMstack App

I recently attended a meetup in Memphis hosted by Bryan Robinson. He is an accomplished web developer with a focus on creating static sites.

This got me excited to finally build my own static site using JAMstack architecture! So, I built this blog template (live) using GatsbyJS and Netlify. Here is the Github Repo.

Lighthouse Audit

I am very pleased with how the site turned out. I used the Lighthouse tool to audit the gatsby site and my blog. Lighthouse is built into the chrome browser. It is a great automated tool for performing webpage audits.

Here are the results:

Lighthouse scores for my React/Rails blog:

The scores are not terrible, but there is definitely room for improvement.

Lighthouse scores for the JAMstack site:

The JAMstack site almost scores perfectly across the Lighthouse metrics. Navigating through the site reflects these scores: pages loading blazingly fast and it generally feels crisp.

Resources

If you are interesting in exploring JAMstack further, here are some of resources I used while learning about this topic:

• WTF is JAMstack? a straightforward primer on the JAMstack architecture.
• Gatsby Tutorial: This will walk you through your first Gatsby app. There are plenty of “starters” on the site to help you get your first site up and running. I personally used the gatsby default starter.
• Netlify
• Tania Rascia: aka my web dev hero.