Jay Gatsby of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby  is one of the most well-known characters in American literature. Above all else, Gatsby is known for being one thing: a dreamer. 

When Kyle Matthews created Gatsby in 2015 and later founded his company, Gatsby Inc., in 2018, he dreamed of a programming language that would make websites easier to build and run. 

Matthews’ dream has come to fruition. In May 2020, Gatsby Inc. announced it raised $28 million in a Series B round of funding. Today, close to 200,000 websites run on Gatsby, including ecommerce sites such as Little Caesar’s, Nick Offerman, and Bitcoin.   

In his own blog entry about the founding of his company, Matthews said Gatsby:

• is a blazing fast static site generator for React.js
• is a powerful and flexible modern website framework that simplifies every step of starting, developing and running websites
• helps you leverage open source innovations in the React, NPM, and Gatsby communities for your web projects
• lets you pull data into pages from WordPress, Drupal, Contentful, markdown—and any other data source you can imagine
• compiles and optimizes your site’s code to make your sites lightning fast—even on mobile

So why is Gatsby often the right choice for an ecommerce website?

‍1. Optimizes Website Performance

Simply put, Gatsby is fast. This is because of a number of reasons:

• Compiles the highest performing webpack configuration to build the website
• Uses Google's PRPL (push, render, pre-cache, lazy load) architectural pattern to boost websites’ performance, especially on mobile devices
• Prefetches resources as users click through. 

Combined together, these innovations allow Gatsby sites to load 2-3 times faster than similar sites. 

2. Integrates with Plug-In’s Easily

One of Gatsby’s greatest strengths is its extensive open-source community. The Gatsby community has already created over 2,000 plugins, including Google Analytics, Shopify, and RSS. 

In addition, the Gatsby community is very lively. Multiple cities (even cities not known for tech innovation, such as NYC) host coding meet-up’s often. So if you have a question, you can get it answered.

3. Utilizes Other Popular Technologies

Gatsby is based on React.js,a popular JavaScript library for UI. Gatsby strives to behave like a normal React app- it utilizes components developers can reuse and share during their project.

In addition, Gatsby gives developers the opportunity to work with GraphQL, a query language which can fetch data from almost any source. Most importantly, it only retrieves the data developers ask for, not the server/source. 

atsby can artfully and rapidly present a beautiful, content filled ecommerce site with a beautiful front end and strong, secure back end. If you are interested in using Gatsby, give Solwey a call.