Why Should You Choose Gatsby For Your Next Project?

5 min readMar 9, 2021

Introduction

Gatsby provides you with blazing fast websites as it has no server-side rendering; it is a static side generation where HTML of your pages are created at build time and are cached by CDN.

Gatsby allows you to use React’s full functionalities. It is a react-based open-source framework with many other additional functionalities, or later we may refer to them as plugins. Before you decide about hiring a ReactJS Developer, let’s go through a few decision-making information.

It uses the latest technologies to build your websites like GraphQL, React.js, ES6, Webpack, and CSS. It is also used to build progressive web applications.

Enough About How Great Gatsby Is, Let’S Dive A Little Deeper Into What Can Be Done Using Gatsby:

Firstly Gatsby provides us with Gatsby CLI(Command Line Interface). It is used to perform some of the common functionalities such as creating a new Project or a starter site, developing your website, providing hot reloading, and much more.

You can create your new starter code using the gatsby CLI using the gatsby new my-awesome-site. It will create a new folder named my-awesome-site, and inside it all your basic starter code. If you don’t want to edit anything inside it, you can directly run gatsby develop command and start viewing your website on the browser on localhost:8000.

You will see some folders and files inside your project and might get confused about some of these new things if you are coming from a React.js background(which is necessary to have a little bit of knowledge about before diving into Gatsby). Don’t worry; we will cover most of the essential things in depth.

Features

1. Components

Components are a vital feature of any React-based project and have become a typical web design pattern. With long HTML code pages, it becomes difficult to maintain such files. So we build reusable components to construct views. This way, we can separate things and can be managed easily. In case you are facing trouble with this feature, you can always hire a ReactJS developer.

2. Adding Images And Media

Images and media are a vital part of your website as they provide a rich context for your website. Resizing images for responsiveness for different devices and applying lazy-loading sounds like a lot of work.

But, it is crucial these days that your website has to stand on top among others; we don’t have many options to do so.

Then, in Gatsby, with merely a module, especially the gatsby-module sharp, you can straightforwardly produce liquid pictures, add channels, change designs, obscure upon burden, and significantly more. This saves a ton of work and time physically resizing pictures and composing express standard code for responsive pictures. It likewise gives you way better execution alongside a smoother client experience.

3. Routing And Pages

Pages are the components that are displayed on the browser. Also, the unique functionalities provided by files inside the pages folder are that each file inside the folder is its route. That is, if a file inside the folder with the name page-2.js will be displayed when you go to the localhost:8000/page-2 route.

The index file is the root route that is the index file inside the pages folder will be displayed on the root route that is localhost:8000.

4. Gatsby Plugins, Starters, And React Packages

You can use the NPM packages, particularly the react ones, to give your project more functionality.

There are very few chances for you to build some package or a tool to be used as Gatsby provides almost most of them.

Using these, Gatsby functionalities can be extended using plugins like CMS, which manages your content and can get your data from them.

5. Themes

Gatsby’s themes allow website uses to be bundled as an independent item for other people (and yourself!) to reuse handily. Utilizing a conventional starter, the entirety of your default configuration lives directly on your site. Using a theme, the whole of your configuration lives in an npm package.

Themes Tackle The Issues That Traditional Starters Experience:

Sites made utilizing a Gatsby theme can embrace upstream changes to the theme. Themes are packages that can be updated like some other package.
You can make various sites that consume similar themes. To make refreshes across those sites, you can update the theme and knock the adaptation in the destinations through package.json documents (instead of investing the energy to refresh the usefulness of every individual site repetitively).
Themes are composable. You could install a blog theme alongside a notes theme, alongside an e-commerce theme.
A Gatsby theme is adequately a composable Gatsby config. They give a more elevated level way to deal with Gatsby, which abstracts away the perplexing or monotonous parts into a reusable package.

6. Styling

Styling your pages to make them look grand can be tricky if you don’t have the proper resources. Gatsby provides built-in SCSS and CSS compatibility and javascript packages to use styling in your project.

Create a styles folder inside the src folder and create a CSS file named global.css inside the styles folder. Then inside the global.css add, some CSS you think should be applied globally or say should be used across your website.

Just import your CSS file inside the Gatsby-browser.js e.g., import “./src/styles/global.css” and you are done.

7. GraphQL

There are numerous choices for stacking information or loading data into your React components. Quite possibly the most mainstream and impressive of these is an innovation called GraphQL.

GraphQL is a query language. If you are familiar with SQL, it works fundamentally the same way. Utilizing a unique syntax structure, you portray the information you need on your part, and afterward, that information is given to you.

Gatsby utilizes GraphQL to empower page and StaticQuery parts to proclaim what information they and their sub_components need. At that point, Gatsby makes that information accessible in the program when required by your Component.

Conclusion

Throughout the blog, we went through the features of Gatsby and a few of their real-time applications. It is regarded as the fastest frontend technology for the modern web and facilitates vivid branding and design services. By hiring ReactJS developers, you can achieve this quickly and efficiently.

If you’re looking for an agency to help you out in your designing expeditions or are stuck someplace, then feel free to reach out to the best design agency near you or simply

Originally published at https://www.zealousweb.com.