I feel great that all of my posts are now safely saved in version control and markdown. It’s a relief for me to know that they’re no longer an HTML mess inside of a MySQL database, but markdown files which are easy to read, write, edit, share, and backup.

However, I realized that a static site generator like Gatsby utilizes the power of code/data splitting, pre-loading, pre-caching, image optimization, and all sorts of performance enhancements that would be difficult or impossible to do with straight HTML.

I’ll give you the basics of what I did in case you also want to make the switch.

A few things I really like about Gatsby

I had over 100 guides and tutorials to migrate, and in the end I was able to move everything in 10 days, so it was far from the end of the world.

There are a lot of static site generators to choose from. Jekyll, Hugo, Next, and Hexo are some of the big ones, and I’ve heard of and looked into some interesting up-and-coming SSGs like Eleventy as well.

There is a good amount of prerequisite knowledge required to set up a Gatsby site - HTML, CSS, JavaScript, ES6, Node.js development environment, React, and GraphQL are the major ones.

Gatsby is SEO friendly – it is part of the JAMStack after all!

Gatsby is a React based framework which utilises the powers of Webpack and GraphQL to bundle real React components into static HTML, CSS and JS files. Gatsby can be plugged into and used straight away with any data source you have available, whether that is your own API, Database or CMS backend (Spoiler Alert!).

The combination of WordPress, React, Gatsby and GraphQL is just that - fun