CMS - Content Management System
SEO - Search Engine Optimization
Hosting - a company owning servers that connects your website to the internet
Domain - the address where your website lives on the server: www.example.com

WHAT IS GATSBY?

Put simply, Gatsby is a static page generator and modern, Javascript alternative to sites like Wordpress. Along with Gatsby, I also use Contentful as the CMS and Netlify to host my sites. Netlify

WHY SHOULD PEOPLE KNOW ABOUT GATSBY?

Wordpress has been a dominate web building tool for a long time. But with advancements in Javascript, I feel Wordpress is due for some competition and Gatsby is a superior platform in many ways. Gatsby Starters

IS GATSBY A CMS?

No. But you can use Contentful which is a cloud-based CMS. Like Wordpress, it allows users to manager their own content. But unlike Wordpress, it’s a separate thing entirely making it easy to distribute content to many other sites from one place Contentful

HOW DOES GATSBY’S PERFORMANCE STACK UP?

According to benchmark testing, Gatsby outperforms Wordpress and other platforms when page load times were compared.

WHAT ABOUT SEO?

Without getting too technical, Gatsby renders plain HTML to the browser which is more accurately indexed by search engines. All things being equal, there’s no reason a Gatsby site shouldn’t rank similar to a Wordpress site on Google. I might even give a slight edge to Gatsby simply for its speed.

WHAT KINDS OF SITES ARE BEST SUITED FOR GATSBY?

Gatsby is ideal for sites where social sharing is important. This includes, but is not limited to, e-commerce, blogs and marketing sites. Gatsby is not ideal for apps where lots of dynamic content is involved. This includes, but is also not limited to, real-time trading apps and games.

WHAT ARE THE DOWNSIDES?

Tools like Wordpress are far easier for a layman to use. Gatsby, on the other hand, probably needs to be developed by a developer. I guess if the goal is to get a website up yourself, and you’re not particularly technical, maybe try Wix. Site builder tools, while easy to use, often suffer slow performance and are potential targets for hackers as they get bigger and more complicated.