Unlock Lightning-Fast Rebuilds with Gatsby Cloud’s Incremental Builds
The Speed and Security of Static Sites, Without the Drawbacks
Historically, static sites have offered numerous advantages, including speed, security, and scalability. However, they’ve also had a significant limitation: monolithic builds. Whenever code or data changes, the entire platform rebuilds, leading to increasing build times as the site grows. This O(n) problem means that correcting a single typo requires the same amount of time as the initial build.
The Game-Changing Solution: Incremental Builds
Gatsby Cloud has introduced a revolutionary feature: incremental builds. This innovation allows you to rebuild only the affected parts of your site, rather than the entire platform. With incremental builds, you can make changes to your content or data and see the results in mere seconds – without triggering a full rebuild.
What is Gatsby Cloud?
Gatsby Cloud is a platform designed to optimize the speed and functionality of Gatsby sites. It’s specifically engineered to help users set up projects with ease and take advantage of the Gatsby open-source framework’s capabilities. Gatsby Cloud works seamlessly with any headless CMS, and offers automated setup with partner integrations like Contentful, Sanity, DatoCMS, CosmicJS, WordPress (alpha), and Drupal (alpha).
The O(n) Problem Solved
Gatsby Cloud’s incremental builds transform the static site O(n) problem into an O(1) situation. This means that build times no longer increase with the size of your site. Whether you have 100 pages or 100,000, incremental builds leave unchanged pages alone, resulting in lightning-fast rebuilds.
How Does it Work?
Incremental builds can be triggered by content changes on your CMS or data updates. When a change is detected, Gatsby Cloud rebuilds only the affected pages, resulting in build times of under 10 seconds. Changes to your codebase still trigger a full rebuild, but the Gatsby team is working on supporting incremental builds for code changes in the near future.
Enabling Incremental Builds
To take advantage of incremental builds, head to Gatsby Cloud and enable the feature in your site settings. Note that your first incremental build will establish a baseline, after which subsequent builds will be significantly faster. You can also integrate your CMS and GitHub with Gatsby Cloud to trigger automatic builds.
Experience the Power of Incremental Builds
Gatsby Cloud offers a 14-day free trial, allowing you to experience the benefits of incremental builds firsthand. With support for Gatsby version 2.20.4 and higher, you can upgrade your existing site and start enjoying the fastest build times possible.