Gatsby, alongside Next.js, is becoming a universal React solution for new tech challenges. Developers are constantly looking for new ways to magnify their tech stack and be even more practical and powerful.
What is Gatsby JS?
It’s another static site generator. Gatsby enables developers to build blazing fast, secure, and powerful websites using a React-based framework and innovative data layer that makes integrating different content, APIs, and services into one web experience effortless.
Gatsby is used to building static websites following the JAMstack approach. JAMstack is a modern methodology for using JavaScript, APIs, and Markup to build websites.
I like to define Gatsby as the “second leg” of the JAMstack’s world tour, which results in better performance, increased security, cheap and easy scaling, better developer experience.
What makes Gatsby JS so unique?
As a React framework, Gatsby JS is full of excellent features that comprehend it from other static site generators.
- Gatsby pairs well with platforms like Netlify and Vercel, and you can easily configure your site to build and deploy every time you push to GitHub.
- Gatsby.js builds the fastest possible website. Instead of waiting to generate pages when a user requests it, its pre-builds pages and lifts them into a global CDN — ready to be delivered instantly to your users wherever they are.
- Gatsby’s data plugin ecosystem lets you build sites with the data you want — from one or many sources: Pull data from headless CMSs, SaaS services, APIs, databases, your file system, directly into your pages using Graph QL or a simple REST API.
- Gatsby also provides a wealth of APIs that make the development of static websites much more straightforward.
- Gatsby sites are SEO friendly, which leads to higher organic traffic that increases over time. This results in your website being ranked higher on search engines.
When to use Gatsby JS?
The two most important things you should have in your mind before using Gatsby are knowing what you want to build and your goal.
Gatsby should be your choice when you need a static site because it’s optimized for generating static websites. Gatsby is a potent tool for building and creating PWA static websites, hybrid eCommerce platforms, and many, many more.
As a content writer, my goal is to have SEO-friendly, high-quality content. Strictly, for this reason, I found Gatsby JS suitable for getting noticed by our users and by Google itself.
The even better thing is the integration of Gatsby with BCMS headless CMS, which leads to a more accessible editing experience.
When to avoid Gatsby JS?
Even though Gatsby is the popular framework suitable for various use cases, you need to know that it is not the ultimate solution for everything that bothers you.
More content - slower builds
Before Incremental building functionality, Gatsby had to build all pages, regardless of whether they were changed or not. So, when I forgot to type a dot at the end of a sentence on a blog, all 1000+ pages had to be re-built.
After Gatsby came out with Incremental builds functionality, this is having been solved, and now only the pages that contain some content changes are being re-built
Still, you need to keep in mind that Gatsby can get quite chaotic if you edit website content directly inside code. The best way to avoid chaotically editing is to integrate Gatsby with headless CMS.
The dynamic environment makes Gatsby JS look like an underdog.
If you have a fully dynamic website, you should consider frameworks like Next.js (React) or Nuxt.js (Vue). Gatsby is suitable for static, pre-generated websites.
If you are not a fan of ReactJS, you are not of Gatsby JS either.
Since Gatsby is nothing but a React framework, you can use the existing techniques and components of React app there. But, if you never worked with React or didn’t like it that much, then Gatsby is probably not for you. In that case, some other Javascript frameworks, such as Nuxt or Gridsome (Vue.js).
Gatsby JS “influencers” list
It’s time to introduce you to the people who contribute to Gatsby, who use it daily and know how to answer any questions or doubts you may have.
First, there are founders and employees at Gatsby. They are active on their social media accounts, and some of them are creating various content that’ll help you stay up to date with the latest Gatsby news.
@ Kyle Mathews CEO
@ Sam Bhagwat Co-founder
@ Paul Scanlon Senior Software Engineer at Gatsby and actively developing multiple open-source Gatsby themes and plugins.
@ Dustin Schau front-end developer specializing in JavaScript
To meet the whole Gatsby team, click here ➡️ 15 Gatsby developers to follow in 2022
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