We've migrated to Gatsby

It’s 2018 and our old website based on Ruby on Rails was kind of heavy for it’s functionality. Also it’s quite time-consuming to manually optimize everything.. and we wanted to launch a blog to share our experiences.

So we thought, why not give Gatsby a try!

Gatsby - a static website generator

Pros

Gatsby allows anyone to build websites using all the new technologies and website performance optimization techniques.

To name a few:

• React.js
• PWA (Progressive Web Apps)
• Progressive/Responsive Image Loading and Optimization
• Inline critical CSS
• GraphQL

The most interesting thing about it is that it allows you to build your website as a React.js application. This results in an awesome development experience. Once built - you can generate static pages from your app and these will work very fast. Gatsby does quite a lot of optimizations automatically which you will have quite a hard time implementing manually.

Cons

Since with Gatsby you are basically going serverless.. you’ll have to either rely on external Saas providers for implementing common ‘dynamic’ website functionality (like authentication, forms, paywalls) or you’ll have to develop these separately.

Final words

We are excited about all the possible improvements React.js, PWA and GraphQL are capable of bringing to the Web and Gatsby definitely is a handy tool to start using all that goodness.

But is it possible to integrate Gatsby with Magento 2? This is what we need to find out..