Benefits of using Gatsby Cloud to host your Shopify Storefront

You’re starting up a new Ecommerce store with Shopify and you’ve chosen Gatsby. Developers love working with it and customers will appreciate the blazing fast page loads and content delivery. Now the big question is, where can you host your site? There are a lot of great options out there. Netlify is a commonly used web host service for Gatsby projects. With its ease of use, custom contracts, analytics, and audit logs, you can’t exactly go wrong with it. A2 Hosting is another popular choice that will provide a staging site along with a site builder to ensure seamless changes. A2 allows for cPanel hosting, a great administration tool for web hosting. These are two great services, but there is another contender that may meet all your ecommerce needs and more.

The Fastest Frontend Framework?

A little background on Gatsby before we get started on the many benefits of Gatsby Cloud. The Gatsby framework is an open source static site generating framework built on top of React and takes advantage of the powerful GraphQL language. Its fast speed is due to the generation of static pages during the initial build process, cutting out the need to render pages upon request. The framework delivers a lot of flexibility and versatility since it is built on top of Javascript and React. This versatility allows Developers to incorporate a lot of advanced and simple features. Discussing the speed of Gatsby is important for a reason, you want to take advantage of this speed and in order to do so you have to pick a great hosting service to do so. The developers over at Gatsby have created a new platform known simply as the Gatsby Cloud. This provides many benefits that we will go over in this article.

First thing is setting up the project from the ground up. If you already have a Gatsby website going then you don’t really need to worry about this part of the discussion. If you are at square one and just getting started with your online store, then Gatsby Cloud has a great starter project. This is a demo store that serves as a proof of concept for the Gatsby and Shopify integration. The project is ready for you to deploy on the Gatsby Cloud and ready for you to tweak and personalize however you’d.

Gatsby + Shopify: An Ecommerce Dream Team

Now to talk about the integration of Shopify and Gatsby that makes using Gatsby Cloud more lucrative. Shopify now offers a source plug-in for Gatsby that allows you to pull and push products, content, and services from Shopify into your Gatsby website incredibly fast. The integration with Shopify also allows you to access your production URL from your shopify admin alongside all your build stats. The Gatsby Source Shopify package was taken over by the Gatsby team and the team made a few updates. One of those updates was leveraging Shopify’s bulk API to retrieve data asynchronously in large volumes. This saves time to develop your end user experience over having to build out custom data fetching logic.

If your business has taken or will take on an omnichannel business model, Gatsby Cloud supports sales channels that allow stores to send different products to different channels. You no longer have to limit your ecommerce storefront to one point of sale because of your hosting service.

Delivering Content to your Customers

Another popular tool for storefronts to use is a content management system (CMS). As long as your content management system is included in this list of supported CMSs, Gatsby Cloud allows you to integrate your system seamlessly with CMS Previews. This tool allows you to preview your content in real time and collaborate quickly with content managers. This leads us to a very important feature of Gatsby itself and the Cloud: Incremental preview builds.

Incremental Builds allow you to make changes to product data and other content without having to rebuild the entire Gatsby site. Currently most Gatsby projects will require a lengthy build time after content is updated on the Shopify admin. We’ve dealt with plenty of slow build times at Endertech and this increases our development and deployment time. Incremental builds allow for the Gatsby project to only rebuild the pages that are affected by the content change. This cuts development time down to seconds and even milliseconds after content changes. Store managers can deploy changes in seconds after making changes to a product, services, or content.

Probably the most important feature is the global content delivery network offered by the Gatsby Cloud. You want your store to reach as far as possible and to offer top tier performance despite network traffic. Gatsby Cloud’s content delivery network also offers a few levels of security that will secure your data and that of your customers.

Conclusion

Gatsby Cloud is a great opportunity to maximize your Gatsby Shopify storefront. You can take advantage of a great starter application or simply migrate your existing ecommerce project. There are a great deal of tools that come with the Gatsby and Shopify integration that you, your developers, and your Ecommerce customers can benefit from. Delivering content to your customers is faster than ever no matter how far your customers are and how much traffic your site may experience at any given moment.

If you aren’t convinced or need help, contact us for a consultation. We’ll help you migrate your existing Gatsby project or get you started on a new storefront project entirely.