GatsbyJS Or Wordpress? 3 Compelling Reasons Why You Should Use GatsbyJS For Your Niche Site
It’s time to blog the new way.
You might have heard of GatsbyJS and all the cool things about it, and you are wondering now if you should use Gatsby JS or Wordpress.org for your (new) niche site.
Although both of them are free, GatsbyJS beats Wordpress.org hands off for several reasons.
1. The speed of GatsbyJS site is unbeatable
Site’s speed is tightly linked to the quality of user experience and SEO of your site. One of the reasons why Wordpress site is slow is because of the underlying database (that structures posts, menus, etc.). When a user visits a page, PHP will fetch the data from the database and return the data to the user, which is then displayed on user’s browser with the help of HTML and CSS.
Static sites, on the other hand, are just a few HTML and CSS files bundled together in a folder. My website — what you are looking at now — is literally a folder sitting in my laptop. That’s pretty cool, huh? There’s no database needed, so page loading is incredibly fast. One way to verify this is to analyze websites with Google’s PageSpeed Insights. You will see that most Wordpress sites struggle to get their score above 50! Here’s the speed score of my website:
You can see that even though my website is rather image-heavy, it still has a very good score.
2. Fast deployment (less than minutes)
I wrote about my whole experience of setting up a Gatsby website and deploy it with Netlify.
For small sites like a blog, Netlify (a hosting platform for static sites) is totally free. Their service is absolutely amazing for the ZERO dollar you paid. When I first wanted to build my own website, I was prepared to pay a few hundred bucks for a hosting service a year. Now I’m hosting this website with Github and deploy it for FREE with Netlify!
Whenever I have a new post, I just have to push it to Github with 2 lines of Bash commands. Then I deploy the site on Netlify by clicking one button “Trigger deploy”. Before I’ve grabbed myself a cup of tea, the site is already live! The whole process takes me 2–3 minutes. Everything is simplified for you, which is fantastic. This is what you can truly call the minimalism style of blogging 😉.
You will never want to go back to the slow, endless configuring of Wordpress dashboard.
If you want to know more about how I built this website with GatsbyJS and Netlify from scratch, check out the article below.
3. No security and plugin compatibility headaches
If you want to keep your Wordpress out of hackers’ target, you’ve got to constantly maintain and update your plugins. The bad news is, it’s not uncommon for Wordpress sites to use dozens of plugins. Managing them may make you want to pull your hair out at some point.
Worse yet, not all Wordpress plugins are developed professionally and conform the best practices, resulting in conflicts and compatibility issues. It’s not a little known fact that many Wordpress bloggers spend a lot of time fixing configuring, updating and fixing plugins on their sites, or have to hire someone else to do it.
With a static site like Gatsby, you can forget about this headaches, because:
- Firstly, there is no underlying database to be hacked, so there stands very little chance for malicious requests and security breach.
- Secondly, once your website is set, you can essentially forget about it. No maintenance is needed. You just need to focus on writing your post, and publish it without finger-crossing worrying something would break.
Compared to Wordpress, the GatsbyJS project is relatively young (launched in 2015). It is built very professionally and adds new features regularly. Plugins are developed under good standard. If you want to add a new feature on your website, such as Google Analytics traffic tracking, a table of content for your posts or writing emojis, you can do it simply by install the plugin and add it to your gatsby-confile.js file.
It’s quick, painless and enjoyable. The proof is I’ve never experienced any conflicts or problems with any Gatsby plugins since I started this website.
In conclusion, Gatsby websites are faster (in every way that matters), much more secure, and zero maintenance needed. It may seem too good to be true, yet in fact, it’s both good and true 😉.
Originally published at https://www.thuhienvu.com.
