Well, I did it.

I jumped on the Gatsby bandwagon, and it seems pretty great so far!

Also, there’s been a very nice bump in overall site performance and experience (Chrome Lighthouse audits):

I’m planning to make a quick video of my experience and update this post with it, but I wanted to share what I did here, for reference.

Disclaimer: I don’t recommend moving your front-end to Gatsby and using WordPress as an API unless you’re working with a developer. I’m sure that WPAABES (WordPress as a back end service, you heard it here!) will be available with themes to choose from soon.

Steps I Took to Move to Gatsby

• I read a LOT of articles and documentation in prep for this.
• I moved my WordPress blog install over to ⚡ Pantheon ⚡, which allows for a few free development sites on their amazing hosting and infrastructure at no charge. For the purposes of moving to Gatsby, it creates a separate endpoint outside of my main website to build the Gatsby site from. Pretty slick 😎.
• Followed the setup instructions for the Gatsby Tabor Theme setup (note, read the issues on this repo, the workspace is site and not starter).
• Switched out all the occurrences of the sample domain for my own in the gatsby-config.js files. At this point, I was able to run yarn workspace site develop and all my content was pulled into my local Gatsby site. Amazing! Note: make sure your theme’s menu is PRIMARY, otherwise you’ll get build errors, see this article.
• I had some mixed content warnings, probably from years ago before HTTPS was standard. A quick find and replace in my database fixed that.
• Moved my images to Cloudinary.
• There was also an issue with site internal links: WordPress by default uses full URLs, including my domain (e.g. https://live-n8finch.pantheonsite.io/whatever-post instead of the relative /whatever-post). So, I ran a quick SQL find-and-replace in the post_content column of the wp_posts table (Note: only do this if you know what you’re doing, are not working with serialized data, and have a backup):

UPDATE wp_posts

SET    post_content = replace(post_content, 'https://live-n8finch.pantheonsite.io/', '/');

• Switch out the Dribbble icon for a Github icon
• Fixed an issue on the posts archive page with SEO, filed a Pull Request for it as well, #opensource!!!
• Easily and quickly deployed to Netlify from the repo.

And that was basically it!

Things I’m still working out…

• I tried to add a manifest to the site to make it a PWA, but got an incompatibility error, and needed to update the GatsbyJS version. However, updating Gatsby broke a lot of other things, so I went ahead and rolled back (and silently thanked the WordPress community that seems to have gotten past a lot of these update-and-break issues!). Turns out I didn’t need to update Gatsby core for the manifest to work!
• There is currently no favicon for the site, probably related to the manifest I finally got the icon in the right spot of the public file… 😆, only took me 9 attempts!!
• There’s no comments on the site anymore. I knew that going into this. I don’t have a ton of comments, but there are a few I wanted to preserve. Not sure if I will transfer things to Disqus, code something up, just leave them off.
• I’m using this Netlify deploy plugin, which works great, but is a manual process, I’ll probably fork it, add in a hook to deploy on publishing a post/page (and maybe updating a post/page?).

Other than that, I couldn’t be happier. Gatsby is a great tool to work with. I will probably roll my own theme, or regular Gatsby install soon, especially since Gatsby Themes are not production ready.

It’s been fun, just what web dev should be!