I’ve been creating websites using CMS like WordPress for a while and it's been fun. I’ve worked with Gatsby for a couple of months now and it’s been some experience, especially for someone who is relatively new to front-end engineering. It has been… pretty exciting.
GatsbyJS is a static site generator with its key feature being blazing fast performance. It’s a framework based on React and powered by GraphQL which are some of the best tools for web development.
Gatsby goes beyond static as it is used for building dynamic Apps and serves it as static assets, this works by pulling the data from its source (Contentful, Drupal, WordPress, Markdown, APIs, Databases, YAML, JSON, CSV, etc.) centralizes the data access with GraphQL and serves the data as optimized static assets. This makes Gatsby an amazingly powerful tool.
Gatsby creates websites and Apps by default with optimal performance tuning out the box, which is really cool because that way I don’t have to worry much about the performance of my site or App. Also, as far as documentation is concerned, Gatsby has one of the best out there, coupled with Plugins, resources on GitHub, Podcasts, Videos, etc, and a great DEV Community. This makes it easier to learn and work with Gatsby.
There's no denying it, CMS like WordPress is extremely popular, WordPress is used by over 35.7% of all websites on the Internet. This is because of its simplicity to add content for non-devs and the rapidity to modify anything that goes with it. But more often than not, this comes at the sacrifice of features like speed, content optimization, and utilization of some of the latest web technologies and that's where GatsbyJS comes in.
Note: GatsbyJS builds the fastest possible website [this is a crucial SEO ranking factor on Google along with content optimization]. Gatsby loads only the critical HTML, CSS, data, and JavaScript so your site loads as fast as possible. Once loaded, it pre-fetches resources for other pages, so clicking around the site feels incredibly fast.
The world of powerful static site generator framework tools like Gatsby is growing stronger, static site generators are being used to build the web of the future. I certainly feel happy working with Gatsby and I believe its future is very, very bright. I am pumped to keep building awesome projects on Gatsby and I look forward to the amazing possibilities of this framework.
If you’re interested in knowing more about GatsbyJS, you should definitely check the official Docs out.
