Shane Thomas shares insights on deploying Gatsby sites powered by Drupal, emphasizing the use of the JSON: API module over GraphQL for its superior development benefits and improvements. He highlights the importance of using the JSON: API Extras module to streamline build times by disabling unnecessary entity types, which enhances performance in Gatsby projects. Thomas also advises leveraging the Gatsby Drupal module for content editors, enabling faster publishing through incremental and cloud builds. To optimize data sourcing, he recommends keeping the JSON: API public to utilize Drupal's caching, thereby accelerating development. He suggests employing the Fastbuilds option for efficient local and preview builds, and integrating specific gatsby-source-drupal plugin options to selectively download required media files. Additionally, he mentions the forthcoming release of Image CDN for Drupal on Gatsby Cloud, which promises to significantly reduce build times by eliminating the need to download images during development.