Features of GatsbyJS

Discover what makes GatsbyJS great to work with and the reasons for all the fuss around it.

We'll cover the following

Features

Let’s briefly examine Gatsby’s features, and what makes it so wonderful. There are quite a few other features we don’t cover here, but we focus on some key ones.

Speed and performance

Gatsby bakes in performance improvements at the framework level. We nerd out about performance, so you don’t have to!

– Gatsby documentation

As a framework that generates static sites, Gatsby creates sites with a fast web page speed and load times that beat regular web applications. Gatsby’s build process fetches, aggregates, and computes all the data we need for our web applications. This makes them readily available at runtime when they are requested, and greatly reduces page load and data fetching times.

Also, the build process includes some heavy image optimization to reduce assets and lazy load the images, with code splittingCode splitting is the splitting of code into various bundles or components, which can then be loaded on-demand or in parallel., smart preloading, and the inlining of assets. This is all to ensure that our website or application’s performance is perfect.

Data handling

A core feature of Gatsby is its ability to load data from anywhere. This is part of what makes Gatsby more powerful than static site generators that are limited to only loading content from Markdown files.

– Gatsby documentation

The data-from-anywhere feature means that Gatsby does not limit us to only using GraphQL and markdown; we can use data from anywhere and everywhere. This is made possible by using many of the plentiful data source plugins that already exist.

SEO and accessibility

In addition, Gatsby also helps in a site’s search engine optimization (SEO). It helps improve site ranking and performance in search engines. Gatsby makes our site fast and efficient for search engine crawlers, like Googlebot, to crawl our site and index our pages. For accessibilityThe practice of making our websites usable by everyone — disabled, small mobile screen users, users with slow networks, etc., Gatsby already ships out-of-the-box with many implementations that enable our site to be accessible to everyone. It also leaves room for improvements that we may wish to add.

Gatsby documentation is arguably one of the best. They found a marvelous way to clearly and concisely present the basic and advanced concepts of the framework so that it is not too overwhelming for developers.

Other features

Gatsby possesses many other features that make it so great, some of which we meet and discuss in-depth as we go on. These features include a supportive community and ecosystem, Fast Refresh, PWA, page caching, Gatsby Cloud, routing, serverless, SCSS support, ES6 support, Hot Reloading, React, and GraphQL.

Companies using Gatsby

Since its introduction, many medium-sized and big companies have adopted the framework to tap into its performance capability. Some of these sites include ReactJS, US Department of Interior Revenue Data, Figma, Digital Ocean, Lucidchart, Raleigh Bikes, and more.