Update, January 2026: Gatsby 5.16 added official support for React 19, which addresses one of the points below. Community plugins may still lag behind, and the rest of this post still reflects our view.

A year ago we wrote about why Gatsby worked well for business websites. Our own site runs on Gatsby, so we have a stake in this question, and we think we owe readers an honest update.

The short version: Gatsby sites that work today will keep working for a while, but we no longer recommend Gatsby for new projects.

What has changed

Netlify acquired Gatsby in February 2023. Since then, the pace of development has dropped sharply. Gatsby 5 was released in late 2022, and the releases since have been small. In August 2023, Netlify announced that Gatsby Cloud, the hosting service built specifically for Gatsby, would be shut down, with customers moved to Netlify.

The practical effects show up in day-to-day work:

  • Gatsby 5 is built around React 18. Support for React 19 and its newer features has not arrived.
  • Many community plugins are no longer actively maintained. Some still work, some produce warnings, and some block upgrades of their own dependencies.
  • New Node.js releases can cause problems. We recently set up a Gatsby 5 project on a current Node version and the build failed inside Gatsby's caching layer. The fix was to run an older long-term support version of Node.
  • Fewer developers are choosing Gatsby, so documentation, answers and examples are aging.

None of this means Gatsby is broken. It means it is in something close to maintenance mode, and every year the gap between Gatsby and the rest of the React ecosystem grows.

What still works well

It is worth being fair about what Gatsby does well, because those strengths are why people chose it:

  • Static output that is fast, cheap to host and very secure, since there is no server to attack.
  • The image pipeline, which produces responsive, well-compressed images with little effort.
  • The GraphQL data layer, which makes it easy to combine content from Markdown, a headless CMS and other sources.
  • Mature integrations with common headless CMS platforms, including Drupal.

If your site is built on Gatsby and none of the problems above affect you, it will continue to serve pages quickly for a long time. Static HTML does not stop working.

If you have an existing Gatsby site

We would not rush a rewrite. We would do three things:

  1. Pin your build environment. Record the Node version that works and use it everywhere, including your hosting provider's build settings. Many "Gatsby suddenly broke" incidents are really Node version changes.
  2. Reduce plugin dependencies. Remove plugins you no longer use, and replace the most abandoned ones with small pieces of your own code where that is simple.
  3. Plan a migration for the next redesign. When the site needs significant new work anyway, that is the right moment to move it to a framework with an active future, rather than paying for a migration on its own.

If your site depends on a plugin that has stopped working, or you need features that only newer React versions provide, the timeline moves forward.

If you are starting a new site

For new projects we now recommend one of these instead:

  • Astro for content-focused sites such as marketing sites, documentation and blogs. It produces static pages by default, ships very little JavaScript, and lets you use React components where you need interactivity.
  • Next.js for sites that mix content with application features such as logins, dashboards or personalized pages, and for teams that want React Server Components.
  • Drupal with a server-rendered theme when the content model and editorial workflow are the most important parts of the project. A decoupled frontend is not always worth the extra complexity.

The right choice depends on the project. The point is that each of these has active development and a growing ecosystem, which is what you want under a site you expect to run for five years or more.

Migrating away from Gatsby

The good news is that Gatsby sites are usually easier to migrate than other platforms. The content often lives in Markdown files or a headless CMS that can be reused as is, and React components can be moved to Astro or Next.js with modest changes.

The parts that take the most effort are usually:

  • Replacing GraphQL page queries with the new framework's data loading.
  • Recreating image handling, since Gatsby's image components are specific to Gatsby.
  • Rebuilding plugins that added features at build time, such as sitemaps, feeds and redirects.
  • Preserving every URL, or adding redirects, so search rankings are not lost.

For a typical marketing site this is a project of weeks rather than months.

Our position

We liked Gatsby and it has served us well. Choosing a framework is partly a bet on its future, though, and in 2025 we are no longer comfortable placing that bet for new work. For existing sites, keep them stable, keep them simple, and plan the move on your schedule rather than waiting for something to break.

Running a Gatsby site and unsure what to do next? Talk to us. We will tell you whether it needs attention now or can wait.