Gatsby

What is Gatsby?

Gatsby is a static site generator built on React. It pulls content from many sources, a CMS, Markdown files, an API, a database, into a single GraphQL data layer, then builds fast, pre-rendered pages you can host almost anywhere. Because the pages are generated at build time, they load quickly and behave well for SEO out of the box.

It launched in 2015 and became one of the flagships of the Jamstack movement, the idea of decoupling the frontend from the backend and serving prebuilt markup from a CDN. Its strength is the plugin ecosystem and image handling: source plugins connect to dozens of headless CMS platforms, and its image pipeline optimizes assets automatically. A documentation site or a marketing site pulling articles from a headless CMS is squarely in Gatsby's wheelhouse. Its main rival, Next.js, overtook it in popularity by offering server rendering and a simpler mental model, and Gatsby's momentum slowed after Netlify acquired it in 2023.

It still fits content-heavy sites that rebuild on a schedule rather than on every request. For highly dynamic apps with per-user data, a server-rendered framework usually serves better.

Gatsby at Dallonses

We choose Gatsby for content-driven sites where speed and search visibility carry the project. Its GraphQL layer makes pulling from a headless CMS clean, and the build output is hard to beat for a marketing or editorial site that does not need live, per-user data.

We are also clear with partners about when a different tool fits the job. As a web development company, we pick the stack to match the problem, not the other way round. If a project leans heavily dynamic, we will say so and propose something else. When it is the right call, Gatsby gives clients a site that ranks well and stays fast under load.

Building a content site that has to load fast and rank? Let's scope it.

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