Book Image

Elevating React Web Development with Gatsby

Book Image

Elevating React Web Development with Gatsby

Overview of this book

Gatsby is a powerful React static site generator that enables you to create lightning-fast web experiences. With the latest version of Gatsby, you can combine your static content with server-side rendered and deferred static content to create a fully rounded application. Elevating React Web Development with Gatsby provides a comprehensive introduction for anyone new to GatsbyJS and will help you get up to speed in no time. Complete with hands-on tutorials and projects, this easy-to-follow guide starts by teaching you the core concepts of GatsbyJS. You'll then discover how to build performant, accessible, and scalable websites with the GatsbyJS framework. Once you've worked through the practical projects in the book, you'll be able to build anything from a personal website to large-scale applications with authentication and make your site rise through those SEO rankings. By the end of this Gatsby development book, you'll be well-versed in every aspect of the tool's performance and accessibility and have learned how to build client websites that your users will love.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Started
7
Part 2: Going Live
12
Part 3: Advanced Concepts

Images on the web

When was the last time you visited a website without any images? You might be thinking that this is a hard question to answer. Images are a critical part of websites and our browsing experience. We use images for logos, products, profiles, and marketing to convey information, entice, or excite through a visual medium. While images are great for these use cases (and many more!), they are the single largest contributor to page size. According to the HTTP Archive (https://httparchive.org/), the median page size on desktops is 2,124 KB. Images make up 973 KB of this size, which is roughly 45% of the total page size.

As images are so integral to our browsing experience, we cannot do away with them. But when they account for so much of the page size, we should be doing everything in our power to ensure that they are optimized, accessible, and as performant as possible. Newer versions of browsers (including Chrome) have responsive image capabilities built into them. Instead...