GatsbyJS

Is an open source framework for building static web sites while keeping React features. This makes it super fast, lightweight, SEO friendly and best development experience.

Gatsby has a bunch of starters to select from that cover the majority of use cases. Also it’s plugin based, which means you no longer need to configure the build on low level as much as you would need in a common single page application. Though something that’s not so common can be a challenge to set up. But the documentation is on top — take a look here if you haven’t seen it yet.

S3

Because my website is image heavy, it was critical to optimize the storage of my photos in AWS S3 rather than keeping the assets in source. Luckily Gatsby has a plugin gatsby-source-s3-image that pulls all images from S3 on build time and makes them available through Gatsby’s GraphQL layer including EXIF metadata!. Caching the images on build time allows to benefit from gatsby-plugin-sharp image processing and optimize for mobile devices.

Feel free to check out my image gallery

WordPress

I decided to use WordPress as my content management system. Thankfully, Gatsby provides a plugin gatsby-source-wordpress which allows me to query WordPress post and pages through Gatsby’s GraphQL layer which I use to dynamically build pages at build time.

Netlify

Using Netlify, I can easily deploy my site in minutes. I deploy from my Git repository, whenever I make a new commit and push to my repository, Netlify will kick off a build and automatically updates my project to the most recent version.