5 Terrific Reasons to use NextJS Framework In 2023.
Jan. 5, 2023
With hundreds of frameworks available today, it is a bit tricky to choose which ones are most appropriate for you and your needs, especially if you’re a novice.
Different frameworks can make your life much easier and help you build efficiently quality products from scratch, but picking the right one for your needs is key.
In this article, we will highlight some of the key reasons why NextJS is a great first choice your projects.
What is Next Js?
NextJS is a framework built on React, thus giving you the flexibility of building scalable web applications by allowing you to render content both on the client and server side.
NextJS is dubbed: The React framework for production and is so popular due to its flexibility. You can choose to render on the client side on one web page and render on the server on the next page.
Benefits of Using NextJS
Apart from being a full-stack framework, there are many other benefits that make NextJS stand out from other JavaScript frameworks.
Some of these benefits include:
1. Different Rendering Techniques
NextJS allows you to choose how you want to render the content on a page automatically.
Render means renewing only an appropriate part of the information on the user’s screen when the element properties (props) are replaced by new ones or a component state changes in an application.
The techniques of rendering offered by NextJS include:
a. Static Site Generation – Build time Generation:
Here all the content is prebuilt on the server, the server then passes this content to the client and is finally cached.
The client fetches this content continuously, resulting in a massive performance boost.
This type of rendering is ideal for pages such as blogs, products page, etc, where the content remains unchanged upon reload.
b. Server-Side Rendering – Generate page on the server
In this case, the content on a page is generated on the server and each time the client refreshes the page, new content is displayed.
This type of rendering is ideal for apps such as Dynamic News feed, Netflix, etc.
c. Incremental site Regeneration – Generate content on build in advance and server after
Here you can generate the page in advance as part of the build process and still be able to fetch new data on refresh.
These techniques are also possible with React but require a lot of setup and configurations.
2. Performance
It is extremely difficult to build performant applications. Fortunately for you, NextJS takes care of a lot of complexities.
Some features provided by NextJS to help with performance include:
a. Code Splitting:
It is a technique that helps you divide your web app into small bits so you can only load the bit used by the current page.
Code splitting is an out-of-the-box feature of NextJS that allows you to focus on the coding
b. Code Minification:
It is the process of deleting all the special characters, white spaces, and other "not-necessary" text to make the file size really tiny.
It is one of the techniques used by NextJS which results in a significant increase in site performance.
c. Image Optimization:
NextJS comes with lots of out-of-the-box components, all aimed at simplifying the coding process. The next-image component is one of them.
This component automatically optimizes images instead of using the image tag from the browser. It serves the image based on the browser window size naturally (responsive).
d. Prefetching Assets:
Next JS will only go ahead to fetch the assets of a page as you scroll through, which gives the user a great user experience (UX) and loads only what is necessary.
3. File Based Routing
NextJS has an intuitive file-based routing system.
Every NextJS app consists of a 'pages' directory, the minute you create a new file (page) in this directory, NextJS immediately, automatically creates a route to that page.
You do not need to install additional packages such as the react-router used in React.
4. SEO – Search Engine Optimization
NextJS is surely most popular for its SEO properties.
Let us look at the diagram below to understand how SEO works:
From the above, we notice that the bots crawl through your website and perform ranking during a search.
Your goal then is to make your web page as easy to understand as possible and use keywords.
You will do this by providing an appropriate page title, Meta description, etc. (proper HTML syntax).
NextJS provides us with the next-health component that allows us to update the title of every single page easily and add other features to help with SEO.
5. Serverless Functions:
As earlier mentioned, NextJS is a full-stack framework as it allows you to run your Nodejs (backend) code in the same codebase as your react code (frontend).
They both live in the same page directory, which allows your front end to communicate easily with the backend.
It does not mean that the front and backend run simultaneously but rather, the server is only active when a request is sent to it and shuts down after the request is executed.