Migrating A Wix Blog To Gatsby - Read Time 3 Mins

Introduction

Last week, I had spent my time in migrating my blog posts from Wix to Gatsby.

Before that, It took me about almost a month prior by going through the tutorials of both Gatsby and GraphQL so that I could migrate my blog to Gatsby as I had grown frustrated in using Wix over the years.

Why Switch from Wix to Gatsby?

First of all, Wix can be useful for bloggers who are not a developer. But in the hands of a developer, it fails very badly.

Simple features like embedding my code snippets in a blog post which require me to go through a bunch of hurdles to do are quite painful to do.

It was almost the same experience as well for adding pictures to the blog posts.

Besides that with tons of features like the mailing campaigns that I don't use daily. It takes a long time for the website to load which is a major turn off for me that lead me on a search for an alternative.

Blogging With Contentful

Contentful is headless CMS that I came across it while I was searching for tutorials on developers migrating their blogs to Gatsby.

One of the key features that I like about it is the markup editor that makes it easy for you to embed code snippets or pictures into your blog post.

The second feature that I like about it is that instead of having your markup files stored together in your git repository.

Contentful converts your markup files into a GraphQL endpoint whenever you publish a post. So that Gatsby could consume it to create HTML and CSS files from it.

Pipeline to Publish a Blog Post

From next week onwards I will be creating a 2 part blog series, where I will be showing you on how to build a developer blog in Gatsby from start to end.

I will be covering in detail from domain registration to deploying and finally creating your first blog post in Gatsby.

The tools that I will be using are Contentful, GitLabs, Netilfy and Gatsby so be sure to check out my blog or dev.to website.

Conclusion

After spending the time migrating my own Wix blog to Gatsby. I learnt to appreciate why does a developer uses a markup language for documentation in projects.

As it doesn't make any sense to me previously on why should we do it but now after migrating my blog and JAM Stack article by Quincy Larson from the freeCodeCamp to Dev.to I realised the real reason for it.

The real reason for doing it is so that anyone can contribute to the documentation even if they are just a beginner who uses it.

As having great documentation for projects helps to reduce the amount of time it takes to get things done.

In the end, it took a long time for me to migrate my blog post from Wix. Due to this bug in building Gatsby.

It took me a few hours to finally realise and understand by just reading the documentation carefully I had forgotten to add in metadata for a page and post.