As the founding and custodial organization for Gatsby.js, we want your Gatsby project to succeed. That means different things to different people. For larger and more prominent Gatsby websites, success means a high-performance website. For organizations with a team, or teams, of dedicated developers and content editors, it means workflows powerful and fast enough to meet your collaboration needs. It means having the scale and stability you need to reach for Gatsby whenever you need to refresh or expand your web presence.
We’ve built a top-notch sales, solutions, customer success, and support engineering organization to help companies using Gatsby be successful. Every quarter, we onboard dozens of teams onto Gatsby Cloud Enterprise & Gatsby Concierge – with faster builds, more bandwidth, a better preview experience, faster support, and support from our team of Gatsby experts.
Here’s a few reasons why they move over. (And if any of these sound like you, please get in touch – we’d love to chat)
#1: Switching To Gatsby Cloud For Faster Builds And Previews
The scenario: These teams build their website with Gatsby and then deploy to another platform and find that that platform is just not serving their needs well. Video communication platform Brightcove frequently releases time sensitive information. A number of times, slow builds on another platform meant that they ended up getting these updates live late. Canadian financial firm goeasy struggled with builds that would take 40 minutes to 1 hour on another platform. Phone and watch accessory company Pela Case struggled with another platform’s stability issues – and when that vendor decided to hike prices, too, it was the last straw.
How we work together: Our first step when we meet teams like Pela Case, goeasy, and Brightcove is to understand their existing content and dev workflows – which sites they have, what repos they are connected to, where their content teams live, how they handle content previews and deploy previews. We helped them connect their repo on Gatsby Cloud and compare build speeds for similar types of updates on each system. Then, when they were ready – we helped them flip on the production switch and move their traffic over to Gatsby Cloud.
Benefits: With hundreds of thousands or millions of monthly visitors – these teams strongly valued the ability to seamlessly collaborate together and push out the best possible version of their website. They found that the ability to quickly sync with an expert via a dedicated Slack channel was the difference between a project taking a couple weeks versus a couple days..
When to get in touch: If your Gatsby site is live on another platform and your team is feeling pain around build times or content preview workflows. Sometimes we’ve seen teams notice this a couple months after launch when the adrenaline dies down and they go into operational mode. Other times it’s taken a year or two – maybe the site started small but grew in size, or the team grew, or a new tech lead came in, or the team tried to fix their problems on the other platform but it never quite worked out. Either way, we’re here to help.
#2: Getting Ready in Advance For A Website Refresh
The scenario & how we worked together: Many conversations with future customers start while their Gatsby projects are still in planning stages. A couple examples – one at a larger organization; the other at a smaller organization.
Penn State News: We started talking to Penn State way back in 2019 when they were planning a move from monolithic Drupal to headless + Gatsby. PSU News was a long project – it also involved replatforming their CMS, migrating 60k+ news articles, handling workflows for 250 content editors. Along with their agency, Mediacurrent, we were there every step of the way, through project launch and beyond – including helping with the v4 upgrade recently.
SocietyOne: The 50-person Australian digital finance firm had a website on a visual site builder that was slower than their competitors, which hurt SEO. Last December, a new dev hire, who had never built with Gatsby before, built a proof of concept in about a week – with our team available for guidance. Soon after, SocietyOne committed to Gatsby Cloud Enterprise & Concierge.
Benefits: Penn State teams are seeing fast collaborative preview that are critical for keeping a diverse content editing team happy. And a couple months after SocietyOne signed, they launched their new site, 30+ Lighthouse points better than the old one. (We wrote the Gatsby Proof Of Concept Playbook with many of the lessons we learned working together)
When we are usually in touch: Depending on the size and complexity of the site, from 2 to 12 months before launch. The earlier teams get in touch with us, the more we’re able to help them think through architectural questions – but if you’re getting ready to go live and are trying to figure out your builds, deploy, hosting, and/or preview pieces, please let us know as well.
#3: Migrating An Enterprise Web Portfolio To Headless
The scenario & how we work together: We’re working with a….well, let’s say they’re a global consumer business with over 100,000 employees, a handful of divisions and hundreds of brands and products. One of their European divisions started using Gatsby for some microsites. Today they have 400+ sites and 250+ users on Gatsby Cloud. Now, they are trying to introduce Gatsby to other divisions in their company, and we’re in close contact as they try to make Gatsby a company-wide standard.
A slightly smaller example: the Canadian toy company Spinmaster. One of their 12 main brands moved onto Gatsby. They loved the great performance – but, even from our first conversations, wanted to make sure they developed the internal knowledge and skills to move the other 11 over. After they signed with Gatsby Concierge – and eventually Gatsby Cloud Enterprise, too – we met with them frequently. At one point, we were meeting every week – to answer questions about their migrations. My favorite moment personally was when Rubiks.com moved onto Gatsby v4!
Benefits: Put another way – we work with these organizations to move from initial success to lasting transformation. Whether that’s architectural advice early on to assisting with expansion later, we’ll be there for you.
When we are usually in touch: Some folks bring us in the planning process, as mentioned in the previous section. But if not, they often get in touch 3 to 6 months after the first site launches – as their site’s success begins to make waves in the organization and they think about how they can expand upon it.
#4: A Tech Lead Available to Help Your Developers
Canadian finance company Rooms To Go wanted to move their setup to a monorepo structure, optimize performance, and upgrade Gatsby versions,. Florida-based vitamin/natural health supplier Designs For Health needed to upgrade to v4, optimize site and build performance. Financial content company Moneygeek wanted to prepare for Google’s Core Web Vitals search update. Dutch online digital printing service DrukwerkDeal wanted to improve Lighthouse scores.
These organizations differed in size, from around 50 to a couple hundred to a couple thousand. They had talented development teams, shipping and maintaining their new Gatsby site – but often didn’t (yet) have highly important, but specialized, knowledge around Gatsby site optimization.
Each of these customers saw 20-30+ point improvements on their Lighthouse scores, driving huge incremental revenue. Where necessary, our team helped them upgrade to the latest version – and often, onboard onto Gatsby Cloud. Content build times fell to seconds.
These customers’ development teams were talented, shipping and maintaining their new Gatsby site – but often didn’t (yet) have highly important, but specialized, knowledge around Gatsby site optimization. These teams are often excited and eager to learn – we love working with them through our Concierge offerings.
(Note that we don’t build sites – we help your team optimize them. If you’re looking for an agency to work with, please browse through our agency directory or reach out with a bit about your project and we’ll be happy to put you in touch.)
#5: A High-Octane Agency Picks The Best Tools
Sometimes, like with home services software company ServiceTitan, men’s jewelry brand Jaxxon, or automotive marketing community AutoGenius, we’ll see a conversion-savvy demand gen marketer hire a great agency for a website refresh.
The agencies behind these frankly magical results position their services in similar ways: we’re going to charge you a lot of money, and it will absolutely be worth it, because our work will transform your business. They’ll deliver results that will astound – like ServiceTitan increased demos by 18%, or when Jaxxon 2x-ed conversion – and lift revenue by seven or eight figures.
And they will use the best tools for the job – Gatsby, and Gatsby Cloud Enterprise – because moving fast, through faster build times, content workflows, and perf optimization, is worth it.
#6: Outgrowing Their Gatsby Cloud Professional Plan
Sometimes an organization will begin their journey towards our full Gatsby Cloud Enterprise & Concierge plans on our professional tier.
However, as they launch additional sites, or their sites get larger and more complex, they find themselves running into technical restraints — longer build times, hitting build memory limits, or bandwidth limits (especially when launching additional sites).
Or simply: Gatsby was such a success that they wanted to prioritize having the best experience.
Many of the organizations above started out on professional plans but quickly found that our Enterprise plans gave the best value for their organization.
Bonus: Building Templated Sites at Scale
Known in the enterprise CMS world as the “site factory” model, this is an emerging use case that we’re seeing more and more in Gatsby world. Companies like iMotor and AutoGenius are building hundreds of templated websites using Gatsby — often store locations of a particular type of business; restaurants or auto dealerships, say.
These companies use Gatsby Themes along with tools like Storybook to share components, page sections, and whole page templates between sites. Then, they use Gatsby Cloud Enterprise as a centralized dashboard on their site portfolio. These agencies and companies understand that managing hundreds of independent sites with a small team can be complex, and typically approach us to make sure they’ve got all the pieces fitting together right.
Conclusion
No matter what sort of site you’re building, we’re here to help.