Performance Optimization

The topic of performance is a broad one, and this app cannot possibly do it justice. But fortunately, Gatsby includes many performance enhancements that ensure a high-performing Gatsby site with little to no additional work. For instance, Gatsby comes prepackaged with common modern paradigms for performant websites such as link prefetching, code splitting, and other techniques.

For developers working on large-scale Gatsby sites, performance optimization is a fundamental consideration that can have outsized impacts on the success of the site in the long run. In this section, we cover caching best practices, progressive web app functionality, offline support, profiling, performance tracing, and conditional page builds, all of which concern Gatsby’s performance across the stack.

TIP

Two common developer tools to analyze performance are Lighthouse, which provides performance auditing for Gatsby sites in the browser, and Guess.js, which uses machine learning to predict which pages a user will navigate to from the current page, preloading only those resources accordingly. For more information, consult the Gatsby documentation’s guides to auditing with Lighthouse and optimizing with Guess.js.