I recently attended a meetup in Memphis hosted by Bryan Robinson. He is an accomplished web developer with a focus on creating static sites.

This got me excited to finally build my own static site using JAMstack architecture! So, I built this blog template (live) using GatsbyJS and Netlify. Here is the Github Repo.

Lighthouse Audit

I am very pleased with how the site turned out. I used the Lighthouse tool to audit the gatsby site and my blog. Lighthouse is built into the chrome browser. It is a great automated tool for performing webpage audits.

Here are the results:

Lighthouse scores for my React/Rails blog

The scores are not terrible, but there is definitely room for improvement.

Lighthouse scores for the JAMstack site

The JAMstack site almost scores perfectly across the Lighthouse metrics. Navigating through the site reflects these scores: pages loading blazingly fast and it generally feels crisp.

Resources

If you are interesting in exploring JAMstack further, here are some of resources I used while learning about this topic:

• WTF is JAMstack? a straightforward primer on the JAMstack architecture.
• Gatsby Tutorial: This will walk you through your first Gatsby app. There are plenty of “starters” on the site to help you get your first site up and running. I personally used the gatsby default starter.
• Netlify
• Tania Rascia: aka my web dev hero.