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Julia πŸ‘©πŸ»β€πŸ’» GDE
Julia πŸ‘©πŸ»β€πŸ’» GDE

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Why to choose NextJS for future projects

For my latest project, I was trying out NextJS for the very first time. And I totally fell in love with this React Framework. It is fast and has many great features which I will talk about in a second.

NextJS is evolving really fast. The developers of NextJS deprecate old functionalities and introduce shiny new things all the time. The latest version Next.js 10.1 is not even 10 days old and the number of its benefits is huge.

Improved development process - Improved performance - Improved SEO


Table Of Contents

  1. What is NextJS?
  2. What to build with NextJS?
  3. Reasons for using NextJS for your next project

1. What is NextJS?

NextJS is called The React Framework for Production for developing single-page Javascript applications. It gives you a great developer experience with many features, like

  • hybrid static & server rendering
  • TypeScript support
  • smart bundling
  • route pre-fetching
  • and much more

2. What to build with NextJS?

With NextJS you can build a number of digital products and interfaces such as:

  • Web Portals
  • Single web pages
  • Static websites
  • SaaS products
  • eCommerce and retail websites
  • Complex and demanding web applications
  • Interactive user interfaces

3. Reasons for using NextJS for your next project

  1. Not only is NextJS known for fast refresh - because it is clever enough to only load the Javascript and CSS that are needed for any given page - but also for fast installing when creating a new project, and lower dependency size.

  2. The file-system-based router is built on the concept of pages. This means, when a file is added to the pages directory it's automatically available as a route. Nested files are supported too.

  3. NextJS also has a Commerce Shopify Integration with a provider-agnostic UI, enabling you to bring any headless e-commerce solution of your choice. And since E-commerce is one of the fastest-growing industries adopting NextJS, you are good to go. Big companies like Apple, McDonald's, and Nike trust NextJS, so you should too.

  4. NextJS has great adaptability and responsiveness. Websites and web apps created with NextJS work on any device and adapt to any screen size or resolution. Therefore, users can access your website or web app with their favorite device.

  5. Another good reason to choose NextJS is its SEO efficiency. This can help you with growing organic traffic faster, ranking your high intent keywords higher, outperforming competitors easier, and being more visible to potential customers.

  6. NextJS Analytics allows for measuring and acting on real user performance.

  7. The built-in Image Component and Automatic Image Optimization feature automatically optimizes images using the new next/image component.

  8. Last but not least, NextJS lets you create your own custom pages like 404 and 500 easily, how cool is that?


Thank you

Thanks for your reading and time. I really appreciate it!

Top comments (6)

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dastasoft profile image
dastasoft

I use Next for almost every new project I do with React for me the top features are:

  • The file-system-based router is very convenient
  • The ability to choose for each page whether I want to build statically or from the server (or even a mix of both) is a game changer.

For the adaptability and responsiveness part, the real deal there is your own work with the styles as in any other framework.

For SEO, there are good third party libraries like next-seo that are very useful, like React Helmet on React projects, but Next provides a Head tag to do most of the common things for SEO purposes.

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yuridevat profile image
Julia πŸ‘©πŸ»β€πŸ’» GDE

Good addition! Totally agree with you on the top features.

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alexweininger profile image
Alex Weininger

Do you know how Next.js compares to Gatsby in terms of static sites?

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yuridevat profile image
Julia πŸ‘©πŸ»β€πŸ’» GDE

I never used Gatsby before, but maybe this article from the gatsbyjs website will give you the information you need :) gatsbyjs.com/features/jamstack/gat...

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alexweininger profile image
Alex Weininger

Haha perfect! Great article btw

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eliancodes profile image
Elian Van Cutsem

I really like NextJS! The routing, setup and build process is so easy and intuitive. Although I tend to use NuxtJS more since I prefer Vue. But hey, they kind of fill the same void.