Gatsby website using Sanity.io

Posted by Dhiraj Suthar - Nov 16, 2022 7 Min readFrontend

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Introduction

Over the years, Internet users have come to expect more media, such as images and videos of high quality, as a standard expectation. Even though the top websites with high traffic and the resources to invest in developing or making their service more efficient, not everyone has had their fair share of success.

Thanks to outdated technologies that take just enough time to make the potential users of the service bounce off their site even before it loaded.

This led to the splitting of the frontend of the website as well as the backend of the website to better help and refine the tech behind it separately, unlike how the giant monolith WordPress stored data in an SQL server and used PHP for the frontend, which was called a content management system or CMS.

This kind of technology is perfect if your target devices are just limited to phones or computers.

This led to the creation of the JAM stack, which stands for Javascript, APIs, and Markup(HTML5). This is where frontend javascript frameworks such as Gatsby come into play. Gatsby handles the frontend part of the website generating a html5 pages.

Gatsby is a development platform that allows developers to build and deploy web applications using React.js and React Native. Gatsby also has a built-in marketing platform that allows developers to easily create and manage user data, including user profiles, engagement data, and marketing goals.

Gatsby’s rich data plugin ecosystem lets you build sites with the data you want — from one or many sources:

  • Pull data from headless CMSs, SaaS services, APIs, databases, your file system, and more all into one data layer.
  • Use any data you can think of: from Markdown, JSON, YAML, CSV, and more.
  • Get data from anywhere: local files, APIs, databases, and more.
  • Combine data types: mix and match data from different sources to create the data schema you need for your site.

With Gatsby, you can create amazing websites and apps that are:

  • Blazing fast: Gatsby pre-builds your pages so that your website loads as fast as possible
  • Secure: Gatsby websites are automatically generated with a secure HTTPS connection.
  • PWA-ready: Gatsby websites are automatically offline-ready, thanks to the Service Worker that is generated with each build.
  • SEO-friendly: Gatsby websites are automatically optimized for search

At the same time, sanity.io handles the API part of the JAM stack. The data such as tables, databases, video, audio, text, etc., are stored in a content lake of the sanity.io’s database, which can be queried to suit your needs.

Why Use Gatsby With Sanity.io?

As technology progresses at a fast pace, so are the devices and the interactions that people have with various tech devices. If you are a startup or a team with few members, expecting the team to know all the technologies required to implement a new interaction paradigm would not be a great idea.

Using Gatsby with Sanity.io lets you take advantage of Gatsby’s speed and flexibility while using Sanity.io’s powerful content management features. Together, these two tools give you all that you need to build a great website quickly and easily. They help in iterating, content delivery, and overall building great websites.

With the use of a robust frontend framework like Gatsby and a structural content platform like Sanity, small teams or any regular team doesn’t have to compromise on technology, as both Gatsby with Sanity takes care of all the complexities that would arise while developing for multiple platforms.

Additionally, the Sanity.io platform provides an easy way for content editors to manage the website’s content without needing to know code. Teams can focus on building great websites without worrying about technical details. Teams can scale the website with more content, pages, and features without facing performance issues.

Advanced Features of Sanity.io

Sanity Studio is a content management system (CMS) that is open source, headless, and real-time. It can be modified using JavaScript and React. In addition to its plug-in design and bespoke input components, Sanity Studio is a very responsive and effective program. In addition, it has a highly developed block editor for organized material.

Developer knowledge is required since the CMS solution you need may be built using Vue, Svelte, Node,.NET, PHP, Golang, or any other language that talks HTTP. It is safe, scalable, and GDPR compliant, thanks to the availability of excellent application programming interfaces (APIs) for reviewing, composing, integrating, exporting, looking back in time, and listening for changes.

As a developer, your job is made simpler by the existence of languages like Zero config Graph Oriented Query Language GROQ and GraphQL API. When assistance is required, a developer community is available that is welcoming and helpful.

Structured content enables the distribution of information in real-time from a single source of truth, which in turn enables programmatic approaches to processes and design.

Any digital asset management that supports uploading images and can adjust picture previews in real time may be integrated. Also, Sanity has a powerful rich text editor (RTE) that can be serialized to meet the needs of any markup language.

When to Use sanity.io for Gatsby Website

  1. For Collaboration and Real-Time Synchronization

    If you need to collaborate with others on your Gatsby website in real-time, then Sanity.io is a good option.

    Its features allow multiple users to work on the same project simultaneously and see each other’s changes in real-time. This can be helpful for quickly prototyping ideas or making changes to a live site.

  2. Building Quick Prototypes

    Sanity.io is also a good choice for quickly building prototypes of Gatsby websites. Its drag-and-drop interface makes creating and iterating on designs without writing any code easy. This can save time when trying out ideas or testing different layout options.

  3. Setting up Content Infrastructures

    If you need to set up a complex content infrastructure for your Gatsby website, then Sanity.io can be a good option. It offers several powerful tools for managing large amounts of content, including an asset management system and granular permissions controls.

    These features can help you organize your website and ensure that only authorized users can access sensitive information.

  4. Using Content Across Multiple Channels

    If you want to use your Gatsby website’s content across multiple channels (such as web, mobile, and email), then Sanity io can be a helpful solution. It offers built-in support for exporting content into various formats, which makes it easy to repurpose your content for different audiences.

Gatsby Starters

Here are some of the popular Gatsby starters to use in a Sanity.io backed React website and application

Conclusion

Overall, Gatsby with Sanity.io provides a fast and easy way to build a great website. It also offers powerful content management features that make it easy to manage and distribute your content across multiple channels. If you need a platform that is easy to use and responsive, Gatsby with Sanity.io is a good option.

Posted by  Dhiraj Suthar - Nov 16, 20227 Min readFrontend

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