What is Gatsby?
Gatsby advertises itself as “The Fastest Frontend Framework for Headless CMS's”, and if you’re reading about Gatsby - You’re probably looking for a way to deliver a blazing fast website to your customers.
From a technical perspective, Gatsby is a React-based open source framework with an innovative data layer that makes integrating different content, APIs, and services into one web experience incredibly simple.
It allows you to build rich web experiences by combining data from anywhere, and then querying only the data you need for each page or component at build time.
Originally designed as a “static-site-generator”, Gatsby has evolved into a platform which combines static-site generation, deferred static generation, and intelligent page rendering to selectively preload the content that matters. Giving you a blazing fast website that feels incredibly fast and performant.
Using Gatsby over more traditional frameworks will likely allow you to improve your lighthouse scores, SEO traffic, and conversion rate.
Because of the underlying technology, hosting & deploying Gatsby sites on “the edge” allows you to instantly scale for traffic spikes, protect your data from traditional server-side vulnerabilities, and provide an ultra-fast experience for visitors.
There is also a vibrant ecosystem and community surrounding Gatsby, which has led to many plugins and themes being built and open sourced. This allows developers to quickly implement features, or source from Headless CMS systems, without having to manually write integrations.