As I have continued on with Priest Sheetmetal & Plate Ltd to upgrade their website over time we made the switch from WordPress to Gatsby with a Strapi CMS.

The website itself has stayed relatively similar to look at through the transition but has resulted in a marked increase meaning we are able to work with pushing out new ideas and still holding onto a fast site for plenty of time to come thanks to the Static Site Generation and the GraphQL queries pulling it all together.

The first piece on the front end to use React in a meaningful way is already on the test servers so it will be coming soon to the live version.

I’m not sure if a straight rebuild is the right idea for everyone as the time spent in the current site makes you look at all the things you could update so a design change could be in order at the same time but for a very modest budget, I think it’s a good choice for this site and with a better flow of continuous iteration / continuous development we should be able to make those next changes faster.

I’m sure I’ve gone in circles plenty of time but the learning curve was never too bad and I’m looking forward to pushing the next site over with increased efficiency