Over the last few months, the Gatsby team has been working hard on a number of significant improvements to the Gatsby product portfolio, including updates to the Gatsby Framework and Gatsby Cloud. Our mission is to continue to make Gatsby the fastest frontend for the headless web and the easiest, most powerful way to publish content at scale. Today, we’re excited to announce some updates that make that mission ever more true.
NOTE: We’ll be adding new links and content to this post regularly, so please bookmark this page and return often for content updates and links to more information about all of these noteworthy new features. You can also follow our primary Twitter account (@GatsbyJS) and our official changelog Twitter account (@GatsbyChangelog) for the very latest updates.
Gatsby Script Component
The Gatsby Framework is getting a new feature called Script Component that helps developers manage the inclusion of third-party scripts on their sites. These types of scripts often power critical things like site analytics, live help, marketing automation, and other features that are notorious for slowing down page rendering because of the way that they block the main thread.
Developers in our community have consistently asked for a better way to manage the inclusion of third-party scripts so that marketing teams can add the scripts they need without hurting website performance.
Gatsby’s Script Component additionally has native experimental support for Partytown to offload resource-intensive scripts to web workers, where they won’t block the main thread. This new component will help marketers and developers get everything they need out of the sites they build without the performance tradeoffs. You can start using it today in Gatsby 4.15, and it’s just an npm install away! Check out our new Gatsby Script API reference guide for all the technical details.
For more technical details, Gatsby Senior Software Engineer Ty Hopp has written a post that demonstrates how to use Script Component to reduce page load times.
One of the big benefits of using Gatsby is the way it makes it easy to incorporate content from various sources (like your preferred CMS!) by abstracting the low-level logic of sourcing content into a unified layer that developers can query using a single, standardized query language. This approach is not without pitfalls. Developers often lose momentum while they’re in the zone as they switch back and forth between their IDE and the GraphiQL interface to find the data fields they need and ensure their queries are accurate. GraphQL Type Generation uses Gatsby’s support for TypeScript to help solve this problem. New functionality gives TypeScript developers auto-completion support in their IDE when crafting queries for their pages. GraphQL Type Generation has the added benefit of helping ensure type safety in your code without having to create the TypeScript Types yourself.
For a deeper dive on this new feature, Gatsby Senior Software Engineer Lennart Jörgens (@lekoarts_de) has written a post on how to use GraphQL Type generation.
New and Improved Enterprise Plan
We’re excited to launch new Gatsby Cloud features specifically for our enterprise pricing plan customers. Those new features include:
Enterprise Builds
For companies who have large sites with tens or hundreds of thousands of pages, making even small changes like updating a navigation menu can have a huge cascading effect that results in a lengthy build time. Gatsby Cloud’s new and improved Enterprise plan provides an enterprise-specific build environment that boosts build speeds by up to 30% with up-to 8x CPU and up-to 10x RAM relative to the Professional tier.
For more details on the specifics of Enterprise Builds, see our dedicated post on our new and improved enterprise pricing plan.
Log Drains
Enterprise customers will now have the ability to push the logs from their Gatsby sites out to Datadog, which will help them better analyze the data in those logs and act on that data more efficiently. Debugging logs without the help of something like Datadog can be incredibly challenging, forcing devs to sift through reams of log information.
Our new log drain support for Datadog simplifies that process, allowing you to focus on what really matters: your website. Being able to track things like visitation rates, status code response, IP ranges, and so much more will enable you to make the most powerful decisions possible for your site. We’re initially launching log drain integration exclusively with Datadog, but we’ll be adding support for more providers in the future.
For more details on the specifics of Log Drains, visit our dedicated post outlining the details of our new and improved enterprise pricing plan.
Additional International Points of Presence (POPs)
Up until now, Gatsby Cloud only offered access to Fastly’s POP zone that covers North America and Europe. We’re now providing add-on access for Enterprise customers access to Zone 2, which covers Africa, South America, and Australia, as well as Zone 3, which covers the Pacific Islands. Having access to these additional POPs helps companies ensure they’re providing a consistently fast web experience to all of their visitors, no matter where those folks live.
What does this mean for you? If you have a geographically distributed audience where performance to all of your users matters most, we have some great news for you. With these additional zones, here’s what you can expect for end-user performance. For example, if you’re in Singapore, you can expect a nearly 1-second reduction (1227ms to ⚡️ 107ms) in response time! If you’re in Sydney, you’ll see a similar reduction in response time (1068ms to ⚡️ 125ms). These new zones will also reduce response times and improve performance in common locales like Tokyo, Singapore, Mumbai, and more!
For more details on our additional international POPs, visit our dedicated post on the specifics of our new and improved enterprise pricing plan.
Gatsby SOC 2 Type 2 Certification
Gatsby is now SOC 2 Type 2 certified! Following our successful SOC 2 Type 1 audit that concluded at the end of September 2021, we spent the six month period between October 2021 through March 2022 in evaluation for SOC 2 Type 2—specifically for the Security, Availability, and Confidentiality standards—and attained a successful audit with no control exceptions. This is an important distinction for enterprise customers and signals that we operate a mature IT security program at Gatsby.
For more details on our SOC2 Certification, check out Staff Security Engineer Mike Gualtieri’s (@mlgualtieri) blog post on our SOC 2 Type 2 Certification.
Image CDN is Generally Available
At GatsbyConf this year, we announced the beta of Image CDN, which offloads image processing to a specialized service that optimizes your images, caches them, and serves them from a CDN. Image CDN improves build times by eliminating image processing entirely as a build step on Gatsby Cloud. It also reduces page load times, which improves search rank, reduces bounce rates, and ultimately improves the effectiveness of a page. You can read more about these recent updates and improvements in our updated Image CDN blog post.
Incremental Deploys for All Builds
At GatsbyConf this year, we announced the public beta of Incremental Deploys for CMS Preview builds. We are now announcing the beta availability of Incremental Deploys for all build types. Incremental deployment takes the idea of Incremental Builds and improves upon it by only deploying the parts of your site that have changed. This dramatically reduces build times by eliminating another one of the most time-consuming build steps.
With our latest updates to Incremental Deploys, both the build and deploy steps are incremental. When an editor makes a content change in their CMS, only the pages and routes that have changed will be updated. For a large site like gatsbyjs.com, publish times that used to take 40 seconds now take an average of 2 seconds. Enterprise sites on Gatsby Cloud saw, on average, 30% faster time to publish and in some cases 50%.
Some Gatsby customers received even more dramatic reductions in time-to-publish values, with a large mattress provider seeing publish times drop from 601 seconds to just 7 seconds.
For more details on how Incremental Deploys can speed up your publish times, check out Product Manager Jack Sellwood’s (@jackonawalk) post on incremental deploys for all builds.
Gatsby for Agencies
There are tons of agencies out there who use Gatsby to build beautiful, performant websites for their clients. Agencies bring a unique use case to Gatsby because they often build and manage a much higher volume of sites than a self-serve company or an enterprise might. We want to make sure we’re not only helping those agencies serve their customers efficiently but also helping them showcase their work and grow their agency by attracting new clients too.
To that end, we’re announcing a focus on the folks who work in the agency world. Over the last few months, we’ve been conducting surveys and spending lots of time with many of our valued agency partners. We’ve received copious amounts of feedback from those engagements, and we’ll be taking action soon to put all of that feedback to use. Here’s what we’re planning: We’ve decided to create a brand-new Gatsby Cloud pricing plan and product tier specifically designed for the unique needs of our agency customers.
Want more information? Senior Product Manager Kate Griggs (@productbits) details the benefits in her post on the Gatsby for Agencies Plan.
Gatsby Agency Directory
At GatsbyConf 2022, we announced the winners of our first-ever Gatsby Agency Awards, which recognized the world’s best web development agencies that create Gatsby-powered websites for their clients.
We’re continuing to build on our support for agencies with the Gatsby Agency Directory, a new section on the Gatsby website that displays information about agencies that work with the Gatsby Framework and allows them to easily connect with more customers. If you’re looking for a web development agency, the directory is a great resource for finding available Gatsby developers and full-service web agencies to help you rebuild, maintain, or update your website.
Gatsby Director of Content Marketing Jeff James (@jeffjames3) outlines the benefits for agencies—and people looking for Gatsby-savvy agencies—in a blog post about the new directory.
Give us your feedback!
We’re excited to bring all of these new features to our customers, and we’d love to hear what you think of all of them. Tag our main Gatsby account on Twitter (@GatsbyJS) with your thoughts, or reach out to me specifically (@pragmaticpat) if you have any questions.