The simple truth is yes; backlinks still matter a lot. In the SEO game, the backlink will forever remain relevant; because it serves as a navigation route for web crawlers and your users from one page to another.  Although a link can be marked as Nofollow, which means web crawlers are not allowed to follow or crawl the link; when a link is nofollow, it will have no impact on your DA. With some incoming links pointing to your domain from other relevant blogs of the same niche. It will skyrocket your DA and ranking. So therefore, backlinks are still essential in the game of SEO, and you should start to build them. With the more backlinks you have, the likely you are to rank first on SERP. Although backlinks alone cannot make you rank, your on-page SEO needs to be done correctly; you should also consider the load time of your speed, as it is also a significant ranking factor. A website that takes more than 5secs to load usually don't perform well on search engines.