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Four Things People Get Wrong About Gatsby

Sam Bhagwat
July 19th, 2022

When we talk to teams considering Gatsby, we sometimes hear things that might have been true in 2019 or 2020, but aren’t true anymore. 

So without further ado, here are four things people often get wrong about Gatsby:

  • “Gatsby doesn’t do dynamic.” We shipped server-side rendering (SSR) and deferred static generation (DSG) in Gatsby v4 last fall. With server-side rendering – or even without SSR – you can use Gatsby for A/B testing and personalization. Need to call third-party services live? Just wrap your call in a Gatsby Function so you can call the service without exposing API keys. 
  • “Gatsby is for small sites.” Today, sites like Rich Brilliant Willing, Penn State News, and FestivalPass have 100k+ pages on Gatsby Cloud with build times in minutes. Just make sure you use Gatsby v4+ and Gatsby Cloud to take full advantage of our build speeds.
  • “Gatsby doesn’t do live data.” If your data is coming from a CMS like Contentful, Gatsby Cloud will pull, build, and deploy your update in under 5 seconds. If you’re talking weather or sports scores, you can make a live query to an external service from a React component every 5 or 15 seconds. And if your service is auth-gated, just use Gatsby Functions.
  • “Gatsby builds are just as fast on all services.” We’ve custom-built Gatsby Cloud to optimize build speed far beyond what other cloud hosting providers have done. Take a look at PixelPoint CEO Alex Barashkov’s recent article: “Measuring Gatsby projects build time using popular website hosting platforms” for some benchmarks — and keep in mind Gatsby Cloud has gotten even faster with Incremental Deploys launched last month.

 

barashkov_deploy_time

Warm cache build times on Gatsby Cloud vs other platforms (from Alex Barashkov’s post)

If you want to dig more into the recent Gatsby launches, take a look at our Gatsby v4 launch page, or take a look at Juan Rodriguez’s recent piece in Smashing: “Demystifying The New Gatsby Framework”.

Good luck with your project – and happy building!

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Gatsby cofounder & chief strategy officer. Programmer, analyst, writer

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