So here’s what you need for a fantastic e-commerce website – blazing fast page loading, swift navigation, smooth checkout process, and a highly secure payment system. Gatsby JS checks all those boxes and helps businesses build excellent e-commerce experiences thanks to its blazing fast speed, static site generation, JAMstack, React compatibility, and a host of other features that are tailor made for the modern web. If you’re considering building an e-commerce website, Gatsby is your go-to solution that not only makes the development easier and faster but also builds a better website for your customers who deserve a delightful shopping experience.
There are an estimated 12 million – 24 million eCommerce sites in the world. Clearly, your customers have plenty of trains to walk over to your neighbor. However, building an e-commerce store with Gatsby gives them plenty of reading to stay.
So how does Gatsby help build better e-commerce experiences? Let’s find out by analysing all the features Gatsby offers that are compliant with extraordinary e-commerce website development.
Lightening fast site loading
The biggest selling point of Gatsby is undoubtedly its blazing fast speed that makes e-commerce website a breeze to ship with. When buying products online, high definition product photos are the one thing that compel a customer to buy. And that too, as many photos as possible are needed to make an impact. Loading all these photos without any latency is a challenge e-commerce website developers deal with regularly.
Gatsby solves this massive pain point and provides developers blazing fast performance with automated code splitting, lazy-loading, image optimisation, resource pre-fetching, inlining important styles and many more features that have redefined modem web development. Gatsby sites can be 2-3 times faster than their peers. As a result, customers don’t feel a moment’s delay when scrolling through a million products and browsing through catalogues or processing secure payments.
For e-commerce, these Gatsby features are a game changer in scope and scale. In a post-COVID world where e-commerce has become the lifeline for businesses, as retail has taken a back foot, Gatsby allows e-commerce businesses get to market in record time and keep business afoot. Traditional web development could prove long, expensive and tedious for an average retailer switching to e-commerce. Gatsby makes the process easier and faster, allowing retailers to make a strong digital presence.
Built-in Performance
In addition to providing fantastic performance speeds to customers, Gatsby also gets developers a great deal of freedom to think about developing newer features and delightful experiences while Gatsby handles the developmental parts on its own. Developing with Gatsby is quite simply a pleasure as all you need to do is create the source code once. Gatsby then handles all the compiling thanks to its Webpack Configuration reducing development time significantly and making development a lot more fun. Also, the pre-fetching of resources makes clicking through the pages a breeze.
Gatsby’s revolutionary PRPL architecture – that stands for Push, Render, Pre-cache, Lazy load – gives website performance a great boost particularly on mobile devices. As long as you run your page via HTTPS, and install a plug-in, the rest of your website practically builds itself. With such a strong architecture, Gatsby Ensures a match to website performance and development experience. Freeing up developers of my brain coding and compiling tasks allows them to be more creative with your website and ultimately giving you a performance that is enough to keep your customers coming back.
Uses the best technology
One of the defining features of Gatsby is that it is based on react. React is the JavaScript library that uses components to build catchy interfaces. React is a modern development framework that optimises performances and also offers a level of familiarity to developers. It is a flexible and efficient JavaScript library that provides developers a lightweight core functionality that has broad applications. With Gatsby being built on React, websites get a consistent performance and modular build.
A bevy of other technologies like GraphQL, JAMstack, Webpack, and more makes Gatsby websites highly sought after. GraphQL queries can answer multiple resources in a single request. The single endpoint approach helps improve developer experience and enables seamless user experience. Gatsby’s default starters minimise the need for boilerplate code making development lighter and faster, further improving performance.
Built for increased organic search traffic, SEO, and conversions
Businesses that rely on search traffic and conversions – e-commerce in particular – were a priority when building Gatsby. The framework and cloud were created to ace page loading metrics leading to better Google rankings. As is well known today, page loading speed is a major determinant in Google rankings. When you build an e-commerce website with Gatsby, you get yourself a statically generated, secure and blazing fast site that ranks high on Google. This obviously leads to better Lighthouse Scores, organic search traffic, better conversions, and increased profits.
Gatsby websites are lightweight and smoother resulting in seamless navigation and hence improve Search Engine Optimisation, this resource.
Easy integrations
Most businesses already have systems that they have been using for a while now. They have a content management systems like WordPress, Contentful, or REST. Gatsby is built to take away the pain of manual integrations by allowing e-commerce stores to load data from anywhere and perform easy integrations, thereby not only saving time but also keeping businesses run uninterrupted and without a glitch.
Gatsby introduced the unique concept of ‘content mesh’ that gives developers access to best of breed services allowing them to easily link third party platforms from a large variety of data sources. This way, businesses can easily preserve their existing content workflows and still leverage modern technology to take their e-commerce store to the next level. While many other frameworks tend to be monolithic platforms, Gatsby moves towards a cohesive model providing e-commerce businesses a uniform experience no matter where you stopped your data before.
Host at scale with minimal cost
Being a Static Site Generator, Gatsby builds e-commerce stores that don’t need a server. They can be hosted entirely free on the Gatsby cloud. Alternatively, they can be hosted on a CDM for extremely low prices. Since Gatsby websites output static content, they are extremely lightweight and turned out being extremely affordable on any platform.
As an added benefit, Gatsby deploys your e-commerce site on edge allowing you to take advantage of modern technologies that prevent all server side vulnerabilities. This makes the shopping experience for your customers even more delightful and secure.
Faster time to market
Gatsby websites are a developer’s delight. They make developing easier and faster, resulting in faster time to market. You can be online before your competitors and gain a winning edge on the market. React and JavaScript along with other modern web technologies like JAMstack, CI/CD and sophisticated APIs let you optimise your e-commerce stores for faster turnaround.
Rich ecosystem of Plugins and Starters
Gatsby comes from a rich ecosystem of Plugins and Starters, drop-in functionality, CMS integrations and image optimisations that help build e-commerce websites that are beautiful and work like a charm. Gatsby’s GitHub page has over 3500 contributors right now. This means that the number of rich Plugins will only grow.
Dynamic e-commerce features
Gatsby’s speed and flexibility allows e-commerce stores the creative thinking and trade-offs that help create robust and dynamic e-commerce experiences. Every use case in Gatsby e-commerce website has multiple options and approaches to develop immersive experiences for customers. when it comes to features likeClient side search, product filtering, advanced scrolling and more, Gatsby leverages reacts global state and context allowing developers to build rich experiences with easy features thanks to faster in-browser updating and reduced network requests.
E-commerce websites are in no short supply today. Shopper’s too are incredibly sophisticated and spoilt for choice. In addition to quality products, it is these carefully thought out features and value additions that differentiate you from the competition and make the customers choose you over others.
With Gatsby, you get to build e-commerce stores that are loaded with features to make customers excited to shop with you, while still keeping the store lightweight so that it loads fast, converts profusely and keeps your business in top shape.
Conclusion
E-commerce stores with Gatsby come with a great set of advantages. Specific considerations such as performance, design, user experience, loading speed, development environment, hosting costs, scalability, dynamic traffic handling and much more. Gatsby’s decoupled architecture, JAMstack, content mesh and so much more gives e-commerce businesses the power to customise customer experiences that charm and delight, as well as reflect your unique brand and identity.
Blazing fast speed is undoubtedly the defining feature of Gatsby. And blazing fast e-commerce stores are what make the customers come back for repeated business. Gatsby’s lightweight websites make the perfect case for smooth online shopping experiences. Your customers don’t have to wait for pages to load. Your e-commerce store readily appears in search results giving you the SEO advantages like organic traffic and rough conversions. Easy integrations allow you to upgrade your website to the modern web without losing any of your data out spending weeks performing complex integrations. At the end of the day, you get yourself a blazing fast e-commerce website with Gatsby that lets you become a robust player in the digital market.