While we have extensive experience building B2B websites with Gatsby, we now recommend Next.js for new projects and typically advise Gatsby clients to plan a migration. Gatsby pioneered the static site generation approach for React but has fallen behind Next.js in framework development velocity, community support, and hosting ecosystem. Build times on large Gatsby sites can become a significant bottleneck, and the data layer adds complexity that Next.js avoids with its more straightforward data fetching patterns. That said, if your existing Gatsby site is performing well and meets your current needs, a migration is not urgent — we can maintain and extend Gatsby sites effectively. The right time to migrate is when you are planning a redesign or when Gatsby-specific limitations are blocking features your team needs.

The most frequent triggers for Gatsby-to-Next.js migration are build time problems, plugin ecosystem concerns, and developer experience friction. As content volume grows, Gatsby's full-site rebuild approach can push build times to ten or twenty minutes, which means content updates take that long to appear on the live site. Gatsby's plugin ecosystem, while extensive, has seen reduced maintenance activity as community attention has shifted to Next.js, leading to compatibility issues with newer dependencies. The Gatsby data layer using GraphQL adds an abstraction that increases debugging complexity for issues that would be straightforward in Next.js's direct data fetching model. We also see teams struggling with Gatsby's incremental builds feature, which was meant to address build time issues but introduced its own reliability challenges. When these friction points accumulate, the cost of maintaining a Gatsby site exceeds the cost of a well-planned migration to Next.js.

Migrating from Gatsby to Next.js follows a systematic process that minimizes disruption while delivering immediate performance and developer experience improvements. We start by auditing your Gatsby site's architecture — documenting components, data sources, plugins, and custom functionality. Gatsby's GraphQL data layer is replaced with Next.js data fetching patterns using server components and API routes. Gatsby plugins for images, SEO, sitemaps, and analytics are replaced with Next.js equivalents or built-in features. React components often transfer with minimal changes since both frameworks use React, though routing and data fetching patterns need updating. We rebuild the CMS integration using Next.js's server-side data fetching rather than Gatsby's build-time GraphQL queries, which enables incremental static regeneration as a major improvement over full-site rebuilds. Styling, third-party integrations, and custom functionality are migrated component by component. The result is typically a sixty to eighty percent reduction in build times, elimination of plugin maintenance overhead, and measurably better Core Web Vitals scores.

Both frameworks can produce fast static sites, but they achieve performance differently and Next.js provides more flexibility. Gatsby generates all pages at build time, which means every page is pre-built HTML served from a CDN — this is fast but inflexible for frequently changing content. Next.js offers the same static generation plus incremental static regeneration, server-side rendering, and edge rendering, letting you choose the optimal strategy for each page type. In practice, we see Next.js sites match or exceed Gatsby's static page performance while dramatically improving the content update experience. Build times are typically reduced by sixty to eighty percent because Next.js rebuilds only the pages that changed rather than the entire site. Image optimization is handled on-demand rather than at build time, which reduces build times further and produces better results through modern format negotiation.

Yes, we support existing Gatsby sites with ongoing maintenance, feature development, and optimization while helping you plan and execute a migration at the right pace. Our approach to Gatsby maintenance includes keeping dependencies updated to address security vulnerabilities, optimizing build configuration to manage build time growth, implementing workarounds for plugin compatibility issues, and building new features within Gatsby's architecture. We can also begin migration incrementally — for example, rebuilding your blog on Next.js while your marketing pages remain on Gatsby, then migrating sections over time. This phased approach spreads the migration investment across months and lets your team validate the new architecture before committing fully. We provide an honest assessment of your current Gatsby site's health and a realistic timeline for when migration becomes necessary versus nice-to-have.