Moving from Gatsby to Next.js

What this post added

This post details a migration from Gatsby to Next.js for a large-scale React website, highlighting the benefits of Vercel's platform in facilitating this transition. Key technical contributions include: - Demonstrating Vercel's role in enabling safe migrations via preview deployments and instant rollbacks. - Showcasing how Vercel's infrastructure supports incremental adoption and headless CMS integration. - Quantifying performance improvements using Vercel Analytics and Checks, with a Real Experience Score improvement from 79 to 90. - Contrasting Next.js's full-stack capabilities and integrated solutions (e.g., `next/image`) with Gatsby's plugin-dependent approach for features like image optimization, reducing code lines and dependencies. - Explaining Next.js's simplified data fetching (`fetch` and `getStaticProps`) compared to Gatsby's multi-layered approach (plugins, `gatsby-config.js`, `gatsby-node.js`), emphasizing colocation and flexibility beyond GraphQL. - Detailing the significant reduction in build times (from 35 minutes to 5 minutes) by adopting a hybrid approach with Next.js's Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR) for a large number of static pages, balancing initial load times with CDN caching for subsequent users. - Reporting a successful migration in three weeks with zero downtime and an 85% reduction in build times.