Data in Gatsby
Before diving in, I think it's important to establish what we mean by data in the context of this book. When referring to data, we are referring to any medium of static content that is not React code. Up until now, we have been adding text within our React components directly. As a developer, this can be a perfectly acceptable way to build a small site but as things scale up, having content mixed into your markup can make it much harder to develop. It also makes it impossible for colleagues without React experience to update or add new content to the site.
It is a much more common practice to store data that's separate from our pages and components, pulling it in as required. There are two ways in which we can store this data: