Why Should You Consider Gatsby  for Your Next Project? 

What is Gatsby?

Gatsby is a React-based modern frontend web framework used to develop blazing fast websites and apps. Its built-in performance optimizations make it stand out among the other frameworks.

Moreover, Gatsby uses powerful pre configurations to build websites that contain only static files.

As a result, it can offer many out-of-the-box features such as high-speed page loads, service workers, server-side rendering, code splitting, intelligent image loading, data prefetching, and asset optimization. You won't believe the speed until you try it yourself.

Once you program and develop your site, Gatsby transforms it into a directory consisting of a single HTML file and your static assets. Then upload this directory to your preferred hosting provider.

However, Gatsby is often overlooked as yet another static site generator because it creates a static build to boost the speed of the websites. Now let's see what this static site generator means.

What are Static Site Generators (SSG)?

Whether a site is static or dynamic depends on whether the web page is hard-coded as a static page or dynamically generated on-request through a content management system when users access it.

The second option requires server-side processing. The role of a static site generator is to make a compromise between these two options by allowing developers to write dynamic code and publish statically.

Using SSGs, developers can create a static site containing files and folders without databases or server-side rendering. Then developers can static sites can be deployed to an HTTP server, where it will return the matching file whenever a user requests a page.

So why Gatsby? Why not another static site generator?

You may be thinking about choosing Gatsby while there are many other popular Static SSGs like Jekyll, Hugo, and expo. These three facts make Gatsby very special compared to other Static Site Generators.

Firstly, it is the way Gatsby builds its data layer using GraphQL. Gatsby allows you to collect your data from anywhere.

It may be Markdown, JSON, third-party API, or even your favorite CMS; Gatsby can load data into a uniform data layer from any data source.

Furthermore, it creates an internal GraphQL server containing all this data at the build time. So, all the data in your react components is queried from that exact location at build time, in the same way via GraphQL.

The second fact that makes Gatsby unique is its rich ecosystem. Even though Gatsby has not been around for too long, it already possesses excellent documentation and many plugins and starters to help you get your site up and running quickly.

On top of that, Gatsby's well-documented data source plugins make the GraphQL data collection as simple as adding a few lines of code in the config file.

The final reason is its commitment to performance. In Gatsby, every aspect of performance and accessibility is addressed with emphasis, and you can experience that in the final product. This makes Gatsby more significant than any other boilerplate or SSG I have come across.