When I started the blog, I wanted a quick solution that simply works.
That’s why I’m using a Gatsby Starter. I didn’t want to fiddle around with my blog too much.
I chose Gatsby because it’s build with JavaScript and React.js. There are other candidates like Hugo, but I’m not familiar with the programming language it’s built with (Golang).
Gatsby offers great features out of the box, and it was easy to deploy to Netlify.
But after using it for over 10 months, I know have a scaling issue.
My Gatsby blog builds around 300 pages. That’s not too much. Running the GraphQL queries in development mode takes around 3 seconds. That’s acceptable, too.
But building the site on Netlify takes around 4 to 5 minutes, although I already use a Netlify cache plugin.
Netlify offers 300 build minutes for free per month, but I’m already clocking in almost 200 minutes a month for my simple blog (almost no images, just text and code examples). I rebuild it every day, because I publish a new post every day.
I’m sure that there are tons I could do to optimize my build. But now I’m at the point where I have to troubleshoot my static site generator. This was something that I originally tried to avoid by using a ready-made solution.
I will try a few suggestions from the documentation, but I’m not willing to dive too deeply.
Maybe it is time to rebuild the site from scratch with Eleventy. Eleventy is simpler than Gatsby. Less powerful, for sure, but I don’t need all the advanced features of Gatsby.
It seems less daunting to build my blog with Eleventy than with Gatsby if I can’t use an off-the-shelf-solution.