What’s new in Gatsby 3.0

Gatsby has advanced significantly with the release of version 3.0, enhancing its static site generator capabilities through several key features aimed at improving performance and developer experience. The new version introduces significant speed improvements by enabling development servers to build only necessary pages, reducing the latency issues associated with large image-heavy projects. The popular incremental builds feature, previously exclusive to Gatsby Cloud, is now part of the open-source version, allowing faster updates by building only changed content elements. The new Gatsby image plugin has been rewritten to enhance performance and improve lighthouse scores by optimizing image handling. Additionally, the latest version simplifies GraphQL syntax by removing fragments and introduces a new hosting option that significantly accelerates deployment times compared to other services like Netlify. Dependency updates, including support for Node 12, Webpack 5, React 17, and others, ensure compatibility and ease of migration, while plugins for WordPress and Contentful have been updated to enhance data fetching and security, demonstrating Gatsby's commitment to delivering a high-performance, developer-friendly platform.