Gatsby is great but it has issues generating sites with a large number of pages. There are performance issues and generation fails if the number of pages goes above a certain threshold.
I had to abandon it for a project that was generating static SEO pages, it was something on the order of 2000 pages and Gatsby couldn't handle it. Hopefully they resolve that soon!
Apparently the latest React significantly improves server-side rendering, so it might be worth giving Gatsby a try again even just with the React package updated to the latest version (and I'd love to hear what the speed increase is).
I abandoned my own React-based SSG because it was slow, but I'm hoping to dust it off when I have some more time to see the effects.
Sorry to hear that! We're focusing on build performance and incremental site builds and will be releasing a major version bump by the end of the year to make the experience faster.
Glad to hear it! I think Gatsby is fantastic and I'm still looking for other projects to use it on. I love how unobtrusive the framework part of it is, feels like just writing a vanilla react/redux app. The GraphQL data layer is inspired!
Awesome! Yeah, that was our main design focus. Make it feel like you're building a vanilla React web app but make it as speedy as the fastest websites.
I can see how you'd have that perception but the term covers a wide swath of use cases. Search engine spam is not nearly the issue it once was. Most SEO pages are created to account for two things: product marketing content cannot contain all the possible terms that people use when searching without becoming unintelligible and data served dynamically through SPAs, especially geographically localized data, is still challenging to expose to search engines even with universal apps.
Read this thread but replace every mention of jQuery with "table layouts", the parallels are striking.
jQuery has been a good friend for many years. It saved us from the drudgery of cross-browser support and gave us an enjoyable API for browser development.
Technology moves on, today's browser APIs and tooling are light years ahead of what we had 11 years. You might not need jQuery, and that's ok!
I had to abandon it for a project that was generating static SEO pages, it was something on the order of 2000 pages and Gatsby couldn't handle it. Hopefully they resolve that soon!