Static websites have a lot of native advantages — speed, security, scalability. Historically, though, they have also had one big disadvantage — monolithic builds. Whenever a static site’s code or data gets changed, the whole platform builds again.

This might not be a problem when you are dealing with a site with a few dozen blog posts (because small sites mean smaller build times). However, as you scale, this becomes an O(n) problem. This means that build times grow as your site grows. And correcting a single typo requires the same amount of time for rebuilding the site as the first-ever initial build.

The logical question is why can’t we just rebuild the part of the site that was affected by new or updated data, and keep the rest the same? This way of rebuilding only the changed parts of a static site is called incremental builds. For a long time, people tried to figure out a good way to do this, but no one ever came up with a good general way to make it work especially on a platform level.

But recently something very exciting happened. Gatsby Cloud introduced a new incremental builds feature for making content and data changes to any website or web app built using the Gatsby open-source framework. Now it is possible to change a single typo and rebuild just that targeted change in ten seconds instead of triggering a complete rebuild that can take several minutes!

#gatsby #react #javascript #web-development