Gatsby 5 is coming soon– the Alpha is live, and we’ve touched on a bunch of new features in Gatsby 5 in Tuesday’s Update Week post. But now I’d like to focus on one feature in particular: partial hydration. We’ll go over what it is, how it is implemented in Gatsby 5, the benefits of partial hydration, and look into how to use it.

Over the past year, I’ve been working on the framework squad, and one of the streams of questions we often receive is about the benefits of updating to Gatsby v4 (and soon, v5!). We often see user complaints about the experience on older versions, which motivated me to write this blog post walking everybody through all of the changes that we’ve made since then and what I wish I knew more about in my previous role. Through this writing, I hope to show the Gatsby of two years ago is not the same Gatsby we know today.