Business advantages of GatsbyJS

Before we jump to learn about the business advantages of GatsbyJS, let me quickly introduce it.

What is Gatsby?

Gatsby is a new hot, loved by developers tool to create blazingly fast websites. A few days ago it received $15M of funding. It’s a serious business but let’s check how it can impact your business.

GatsbyJS in numbers

• 25000 – contributors
• 38000 – GitHub Stars
• 2015 – date of birth
• $15m – round-a funding

Business advantages of GatsbyJS

Your website can be faster than your competitors’ page

Gatsby development allows you to build the fastest possible website.
It means your website can be displayed in front of your potential customers faster than the competition.
Is that something you’re been looking for?

Having to dynamically pull information from a database every time a visitor hits a page on a content-heavy site can result in delays that cause frustration and bounces.

By using Gatsby you serve already compiled files to the browser, cutting load times by a large margin.

Your website is more secure than regular websites of your competition

You probably heard about some last attacks on popular websites powered by CMSes like Drupal, Joomla or WordPress. Even more – you probably host one of these kinds of websites right now and you need to always remember about security updates. One wrong plugin or a week without updating the website and you can be hacked, losing your visitors’ interest and trust.

Even if Gatsby is using third-party CMS to fetch data, in most cases it is read-only access.

While this is a ‘read-only’ token, exposing it in your code would mean anyone with access to your code repository could take your structured data and use it anyway they want.

One of the greatest business advantages of GatsbyJS is a static site generator, it means you will just publish static files, there is no direct connection to the database, dependencies, user data or other sensitive information. You build once – if build works good – you deploy it and no third-party plugin can destroy it.

Because Gatsby compiles your site to static files, rather than having running app servers and databases users are targeting, it reduces the attack surface of the site to outsiders.

How many times you saw an error message that the website is not working because of too many connections. It could be an effect of incorrect code or DDOS attack.

Gatsby lets you serve your site from a global CDN, likely whatever CDN your company is using (eg Akamai, Cloudflare, Fastly…), which effectively eliminates the risk of DDOS attacks.

You can grow your margin by cutting hosting & updates costs

In comparison to dynamic CMSses who need databases, mail servers, cache solutions, Gatsby is much easier and cheaper to cost.

If your website gets popular there is a chance that your hosting will be blown out and you will have to buy another one and pay the migration cost.

Gatsby builds your site on the edge instantly scaling for traffic spikes and shielding from CMS vulnerabilities.

You don’t need to pay for CMS updates, because there is no CMS or you have content provider service as a small monthly subscription which is much cheaper than SLA agreement with your Drupal agency.

You can generate more leads

While creating your new website you probably spent a lot of time on research, brief, design, development, testing, and tweaking. Probably you don’t want to waste your effort because of the long loading time.

Website loading time and bounce rate have a real impact on your conversion rates.

If you don’t believe me, just check WPO Stats demonstrating the impact of web performance optimization (WPO) on user experience and business metrics.

Some examples:

• Radins.com improved their Speed Index by 51% for the desktop experience and saw a significant increase in conversion (+12%) and a drop in the bounce rate (-25%).
• Zalando saw a 0.7% increase in revenue when they shaved 100ms off their load time.

You can rank higher (SEO)

Google likes fast websites – it allows their bot to crawl easier, that’s why it’s ranking faster websites higher. You will increase your traffic without changes in content.

Another paste from WPOstats:

• Carousell reduced page load time by 65% and saw a 63% increase in organic traffic, a 3x increase in advertising click-thru rate and a 46% increase in first-time chatters.
• Rebuilding Pinterest pages for performance resulted in a 40% decrease in wait time, a 15% increase in SEO traffic and a 15% increase in conversion rate to signup.

You can have a better dev team

A good developer is a happy and motivated developer.

As you can imagine its more fun to work with the hottest tech stack on the market (React, GrapQL, Headless CMSes) than installing another security patch on the old Joomla website.

Gatsby has a great community where your dev team can easily find an answer to almost any problem. They also can be globally recognized by publishing their shining website on Gatsby’s showcase catalog.

Do you need to scale your team? It’s easier to find JavaScript developer to work on Gatsby than PHP developer to work with Drupal or Joomla. You can grow your margin by saving recruitment costs.