With so many website development options available nowadays it's hard to know which approach to take. Learn a bit more about Gatsby and how can it have a positive impact on your online business
Posted May 05, 2021
By James Parker
Gatsby is a modern JavaScript framework, based in React, that enables frontend engineers to build blazing-fast, highly optimised and progressive web experiences for your users.
Or more simply: a set of tools we can use to develop exceptionally performant websites unlike any traditional sites you may have seen before…
Let’s create highly reliable and exceptionally performant frontend for your business, together.
When it comes to traditional Content Management Systems (CMS) and online website building tools, WordPress has always been a popular choice. WordPress provides users with a huge range of plugins and themes which allow you to fairly quickly pull together webpages and functionality, with a much lower learning curve than bespoke website development. WordPress can be an extremely powerful tool and perfect for entry-level or simple content-based sites.
The problem with tools like WordPress is that because it uses a bunch of ‘out of the box’ features, these can often experience technical difficulties, service down-time and lack in providing a truly ‘customised’ experience that you may wish to provide your customers.
Here’s the most common issues with website solutions like WordPress and other website builders:
Using more complex but powerful modern frontend frameworks like Gatsby can resolve almost every single one of these problems in the hands of a knowledgeable frontend engineer.
Gatsby allows the creation of fully-customisable and reliable websites that are both highly SEO optimised and provide a seamless and performant frontend for your users.
The framework enables frontend engineers to use the latest industry best practises and 3rd party libraries to create fully responsive websites for all browsers and mobile devices. It also allows your website to qualify as a Progressive Web App (PWA) allowing:
These are just some of the reasons I regularly choose Gatsby to build solid frontends and am confident in promoting this approach to you.
A well-built Gatsby frontend can have a substantive impact for your business - let’s explore a few:
Many businesses invest a lot of time improving the quality of their website content for SEO. What a lot of people don’t realise is that website performance is a key factor in SEO and search rankings in the major search engines (like Google) for both mobile and desktop web applications. This means that many websites may provide high-quality content but fall short in search rankings because their overall performance is poor.
Gatsby has a host of built-in performance optimisations. From rendering your pages to static files, progressive image loading and PRPL pattern, resulting in a lightning fast website and one that is optimised for search engine crawlers to index your pages.
Many websites focus on generating new leads to sell products or services, or to capture customer contact information - turning a page view into a lead is known as ‘Lead Conversion’. If your website is slow, your lead conversion rate will be greatly reduced as less people will spend the time waiting for your page contents to load. This may result in them navigating away from your site before interacting with it. Generally, the less time your page takes to load, the more money you’re likely to make.
A recent data sample from Google Analytics in the US suggests that if your mobile webpage takes longer than 3 seconds to load then 53% of visits are abandoned. For e-commerce sites some estimate that you could lose up to 1% of your online revenue for every 100ms delay for your webpage to load.
A case study by Adore Beauty found that there was a 16.5% increase in conversion rates and consistent improvement in their revenue from a faster page load time.
Gatsby takes the heavy lifting away from frontend engineers so they can focus on performance optimisations and creating seamless interactions for your users.
Gatsby’s performance optimisations result in super-fast initial page load times and provide offline caching so once people have visited your site once they can revisit without an internet connection. This makes accessing your online content reliable and provides the best experience for your users and happy customers equate to healthy sales.
It might not seem initially impactful to your business, however Gatsby provides an excellent developer experience; reducing development overhead, future maintenance and the time to develop new features.
Third party services like Netlify can be easily integrated with Gatsby to enable quick code release cycles and continuous integrations. This removes the bloat from publishing new features to your site and allows development to be more focussed on adding value rather than release management.
Having the best possible tools for the job can help us help your business; with the ability to develop efficiently and to better suit your timescale and budget.
Youfit Health Clubs had an existing website which suffered from very slow load times (sometimes up to 22 seconds for an initial page load!) leading to high bounce rates (users clicking away after visiting one page) and low lead conversion. A recent case study explains how rebuilding their site in Gatsby saw their page load time decrease by over half, a 22% increase in organic search visits and a 60% increase in lead conversion.
Flamingo is an e-commerce site that sells shaving products for women. The Flamingo team wanted to launch a brand new product with a limited timescale but needed a website that would outshine the competition. They needed a reliable and stable frontend that was highly SEO optimised.
High search rankings were a must for the business to be able to compete and break into their respective market. A recent case study explains how Gatsby helped Flamingo successfully launch their products and meet their development expectations.
I recently used Gatsby to rebuild my very own personal development site (where you are now)! I set out wanting to build a website with a new look and feel; with the ability to create dynamic content pages, articles and content all managed with some sort of CMS. With a focus on SEO, accessibility and performance to show just what I can do with modern bespoke website development.
The site was sucessfully launched with near 100% Lighthouse scores across the board, WCAG 2.1 AA Compliant, an admin area to manage all our website’s content integrated with a simple UI provided by Netlify CMS and easy code release management with the domain hosted through Netlify.
We believe Gatsby is the frontend framework to help you achieve a truly modern and unforgettable web experience for your users. Get in touch to start your journey.
Other peoples’ opinions matter. I have worked with many people over the years and think it is important to share their experience of working with me.
James is a passionate and professional developer with a keen attention to detail and deep understanding of his field. His frontend experience, clear guidance, and knowledge of accessibility guidelines and best practices have proven extremely valuable.
Product Manager, Oxford Computer Consultants
Tried and tested React application development. From super-fast single page applications to efficient large-scale corporate websites.
Experienced approach to coding consistent and maintainable frontend templates and component libraries.
Deep understanding of website accessibility, accessibility consultation, practical design, development, and testing experience.
