Hire Qualified Gatsby Developers

Gatsby is a React-based framework meant to make high performance websites and web apps. It’s focused on static site generation, but can be used for more than that.

For static sites like blogs, portfolios, and documentation Gatsby is a great choice. With content that doesn’t need to change based on the user, you can enjoy faster load times and low costs compared to websites with server-side logic. For any content drive site where the only updates need to be from new content releases, it’s a great choice.

Despite its focus on static sites, it’s also a good choice for custom eCommerce sites surprisingly. It can integrate with headless eCommerce platforms like Shopify Headless or Swell making it easy to build fast, SEO friendly storefronts.

It’s also a great choice for landing pages. In general, a static site is what you want for a landing page, and Gatsby is a great choice.

In terms of SEO, it provides good tools like server-side rendering, meta tag control, and sitemap generation. When you build a good static site with a tool like Gatsby, your faster page loading times will help rank your site better on search results pages.

Static sites offer pretty much the best performance you can get for a website. Your results may vary based on what kind of site you generate with what static site generator, but in general the elimination of the server doing anything but respond to a request for a page with the page instead of having to compute anything server side for the individual user makes it about as simple and performant as you can get.

Extremely fast websites are great for SEO, as page load speed is a critical ranking factor. It also means cost effective hosting. You can use something like Github pages to host a simple project like documentation. A bottom price tier VPS is overkill for most static sites unless you need to support extreme concurrent user counts and serve pages from multiple load-balanced locations. With a well made static site, you can see total pageload times of well under a second, milliseconds from the server’s part of the equation. A quarter second to largest painful content load on cheap hosting is easily achievable if you know what you’re doing.

Another advantage of static sites is by eliminating server side processing, you can eliminate a lot of potential security risks. Injection attacks, cross site scripting, and more are not really a problem in most cases. All your web server will do is receive requests for files, and give said files.

The same things that make it secure and fast also make it easily portable. The same site can be hosted on almost any shared hosting or any one-click install webserver setup with no additional configuration. If your web server does that little thing where it serves the website to the web, it serves a static site. For developers, this makes it easy to hand a project off to a client. They can simply give them a folder to place on their web directory and it’ll probably just work.

Scalability is also great in the static site world. Load balancers, mirror servers, and CDNs all become easy to deploy with no need for centralized server-side logic. With static sites the only question that needs to be asked would be “is the user getting files when they request them from the address?”. There are some hilariously hacky load balancing solutions people have come up with to serve their static sites to a broader audience, and they work.

Reliability is also a good reason to go with a static site. If you’re serving on a managed service like Github pages, you don’t ever need to update anything. If Github Pages is up, so is your site. No updates, no vulnerabilities to patch. If you’re hosting yourself, as long as you keep the machine up to date, it’s still pretty simple since nothing about your site can change. There’s no crashing in the static site world, at least from the site itself, your webserver may decide to explode for its own unrelated reasons. Another great part of the reliability equation is when your webserver goes down. Have you seen Cloudflare cached sites when a website is down and been frustrated you can't use it fully? On a static site, a cached site is 100% as functional as the real thing.

Static sites aren’t for everything. A site can’t be entirely static if you need accounts or anything tailored to the user. They’re a great choice for things like blogs, landing pages, documentation, microsites, and content.