Over the past year, I’ve been working on the framework squad, and one of the streams of questions we often receive is about the benefits of updating to Gatsby v4 (and soon, v5!). We often see user complaints about the experience on older versions, which motivated me to write this blog post walking everybody through all of the changes that we’ve made since then and what I wish I knew more about in my previous role. Through this writing, I hope to show the Gatsby of two years ago is not the same Gatsby we know today.

Incremental Deploys now powers all builds on Gatsby Cloud enabling Reactive Site Generation (RSG)

Gatsby’s data layer makes rebuilds precise and efficient. This is how we can publish CMS changes to the CDN in one second — even for very large sites. The data layer also helps Gatsby scale to large sites rebuilding sites as much as 20x faster than other SSGs.

Gatsby Cloud can now publish to our CDN in one second. This is now 100x faster than the exact same Gatsby site building on a standard CI/CD service! I introduce a benchmark to compare Reactive Site Generation (RSG) to Static Site Generators (SSG) and Server Side Rendering (SSR).

We want your Gatsby project to succeed. For larger and more prominent Gatsby websites, we built Gatsby Cloud Enterprise & Gatsby Concierge to help your team achieve a high-performance website, with workflows powerful and fast enough to meet your collaboration needs