Why should you use Gatsby JS for your website?

Gatsby JS is a static site generator used to create high-performance websites. Built on React, it combines some of the best parts of GraphQL, react-router, and webpack for an excellent developer experience. As a result, we will have a much faster site, investing less development time, and it's also ideal for users, businesses, and developers. Beyond achieving great speed, these sites tend to be faster to convert, as they consist entirely of static files, which involves greater security by not having a database. However, it's important to know that if you want to develop a web application that performs many operations or constantly changes its content, it might not be a good idea to use this tool. Since, if your application creates content or renders constantly, it doesn't make sense to develop it with this solution. Perhaps you could use NextJS, which is an excellent option for this case. That being said, let's continue!

Greater Speed = Increased Revenue

Ultimately, this is the point that most businesses care about. This keeps the lights on and keeps us doing fun things! There are some statistics that really shed light on Gatsby's value. The BBC found that it lost 10% of users for every additional second its website took to load. Trainline reduced its website load time by 0.3 seconds and, in doing so, increased its revenue by an additional £8 million per year. In addition, Google found that 53% of mobile users abandon sites that take more than 3 seconds to load. There's no doubt that page speed is a significant factor for business performance. Not only that, when a website is fast, users return again and again to enjoy the same great experience.

Reduced Overhead

Instead of relying on servers to dynamically generate pages, Gatsby pre-renders everything at build time. This means lower server costs combined with faster page speeds. Because of this, more money can be spent on CDNs for a super fast and smooth experience for users worldwide. The site is only built when a change is made, this makes Gatsby an excellent choice for marketing, informational, news, or reading sites, meaning those whose content does not change frequently.

Greater Security

If there is a security breach on a website, it can lead to potential legal problems. Especially with the continuous pressure from GDPR and users' understanding of the correct use of data. Since Gatsby websites are static files, there is no database that can be accessed or hacked. User data is not stored on the website. CMSs and APIs have vulnerabilities that can be exploited; Gatsby only has the data that is displayed to all users. The safest possible scenario!

App-like Experience

With improved performance and features that enhance the fluidity of the user experience, Gatsby aims for an app-like PWA (progressive web apps) experience. There are no reloads between pages, and the website feels fluid and fast due to lazy loading of images and shared code. I hope this article has been useful and inspires you to use this tool, which is undoubtedly one of the best at what it does. For any questions, do not hesitate to contact me.