8 websites made with Gatsby

Barely, and not in a way that should inform a new project. Netlify acquired Gatsby in February 2023 and most of the core team departed soon after. The releases since have been compatibility patches from a single maintainer, not feature work: 5.16.0 in January 2026 added React 19 and Node 24 support, and 5.16.1 in February fixed a Head API regression. The framework is not abandoned outright, but nothing about its direction suggests it is being developed.

No. For a content-driven site, Astro does the same job with far less machinery and ships no JavaScript by default. For anything that needs server rendering, routing at scale, or an application layer, Next.js is the obvious choice. The only sensible case for Gatsby now is an existing site that works and would cost more to migrate than to leave alone.

Its GraphQL data layer was a genuinely good idea — one query interface over a CMS, Markdown files, an API and the filesystem at once, which made content from mixed sources tractable. Its image plugin handled responsive sizes, lazy loading and blur-up placeholders years before frameworks shipped that as standard. And the plugin ecosystem meant most integrations were a config entry rather than a build. Those strengths are why so many 2019 to 2022 sites are Gatsby sites.

Plugins, usually. Many popular ones have not been updated in years, so a Node or React upgrade surfaces dependency conflicts that nobody upstream is fixing. Image processing and CMS source plugins are the common casualties. The framework core is comparatively stable — the pain is almost always in the ecosystem around it, which is the inverse of how Gatsby was sold.

Astro is the closest match in spirit and the easiest move for a content site — it renders your existing React components, so the migration is mostly routing and data fetching rather than a rewrite. Next.js is the right target if the site needs server rendering, authenticated routes, or an application alongside the content. Both have active development and maintained ecosystems, which is the actual thing being bought.

Because a static site does not decay. The HTML and CSS a Gatsby build produced in 2021 renders exactly as well in 2026, and the design work that went into it is untouched by the framework’s decline. The sites in this collection were picked for how they look and behave, not for what built them — Gatsby’s maintenance status is a reason not to start a new project on it, not a reason to think less of the ones already shipped.