Why Choose Next.js Over React

In the dynamic landscape of web development, React has emerged as a powerhouse for building interactive user interfaces. Developed by Meta, React’s component-based architecture, virtual DOM, and declarative syntax have revolutionized the way developers create web applications.

However, as projects grow in complexity and requirements evolve, developers often encounter challenges related to performance optimization, search engine optimization (SEO), and managing server-side rendering. This is where Next.js enters the scene.

Next.js, built on top of React, extends its capabilities by offering server-side rendering (SSR), static site generation (SSG), and other powerful features out of the box. It provides developers with a comprehensive framework for building fast, scalable, and SEO-friendly web applications.

In this blog post, we’ll explore why choosing Next.js over React can be advantageous for your next web development project. We’ll delve into the key features and benefits of Next.js, as well as practical use cases where it excels. This blog post doesn’t aim to take anything away from the fantastic library that is React, it is just a comparative study of what Next does better.

SEO Purposes

If you go and search for an application on Google using specific keywords, what Google does is, it has crawlers which are search engine bots that constantly download and index content all over the internet. The goal of such a bot is to learn what (almost) every webpage on the web is about, so that information can be retrieved when needed.

To understand the problem with a React application, we have to understand how crawlers work. When the bot is crawling the web, it isn’t waiting for the entire website to render before testing for content and checking for relevance, it just hits the content delivery network of a web application, and it reads the content in the initial HTML file. If the initial file doesn’t contain the reference to what the website is about, it may not be ranked or deemed relevant according to the crawler.

This is the case with React Js — what the crawler will get in response from a web application’s CDN is the top-level HTML file. In a React application, this top-level file doesn’t contain details of the content of a website other than the title. The content of a React-powered application is present in multiple JSX files.

Waterfalling Problem

The waterfalling problem in web development refers to a scenario where data fetching operations are chained to each other or dependent on each other, which may lead to inefficient loading behavior.

If we could get all these requests wrapped up in a lesser number of requests, that would lead to better loading behavior of the website. What if we could do something where the initial index.html file handles the requests — this is what Next.js provides you with using its SSG and SSR capabilities.

Server Side Rendering (SSR)

Server-side rendering (SSR) is a technique used in web development to render web pages on the server and send the fully rendered HTML to the client’s browser. This is in contrast to client-side rendering (CSR), where the initial HTML is sent empty or with minimal content, and the browser then requests JavaScript files to render the page dynamically.

The benefits of this simple difference are immense:

• Improved Performance and Lesser Loading times
• Search Engine Optimization
• Predictable Processing Performance
• Reduced Compatibility Issues
• More Accurate User Metrics

Static Site Generation (SSG) and Bundle Size Optimisation

Static Site Generation (SSG) is a method of generating static HTML pages at build time, rather than dynamically at runtime. This approach pre-builds all the necessary HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files for each page of a website before deploying it to a web server. When a user requests a page, the pre-built static files are served directly from the server, without the need for any server-side processing or database queries.

The developer team of Next at Vercel has mastered the art of making your bundle size small. Bundle is your HTML, CSS, and Javascript code that reaches the end-user. We can do it in React by using a bundler like Vite, but Next provides you with this feature out-of-the-box.

File Based Routing

React doesn’t offer you out-of-the-box routing capabilities and depends on third-party routing libraries like React Router, these libraries require additional setup and configuration especially when compared to Next’s simplistic file-based routing capabilities.

File-based routing is a feature in Next.js that simplifies the process of defining routes in your web application by organizing pages as files within a designated directory. This differs from React’s traditional approach to routing, where routes are defined in a central file. It also allows for easier dynamic routing using file names with brackets, allowing for dynamic content rendering based on the URL parameter.

Summary of benefits of File-based routing in Next.js:

• Simplicity
• Predictability
• Scalability
• Enhanced Developer experience
• Unified Codebase

Unified Codebase & Full-Stack

Next.js isn’t a frontend framework, it is a full-stack framework, which means you don’t have to write a separate Express application for your web app to be considered full-stack.

In Next.js, a unified codebase refers to a development approach where both the client-side and server-side code are written within the same project structure. This allows developers to work with a single codebase to build full-stack web applications, combining the benefits of CSR, SSR, and SSG in a unified manner.

Next.js provides built-in support for creating API routes using the /api directory. API routes allow you to define serverless functions that handle HTTP requests directly within your Next.js project. This eliminates the need for a separate backend server. Next.js applications can be deployed using a variety of hosting platforms, including Vercel, which provides seamless deployment with automatic scaling and continuous deployment.

Downsides

With all great things, there are some downsides. Next.js is a great framework for web development and a great evolutionary step in modern web development, but it comes with its challenges.

Deployment over a Content Delivery Network (CDN) is hard as it has both the frontend as well as the backend code. It also needs a server always running to achieve the benefits of Server Side Rendering, which is very resource intensive in itself to maintain, making it very costly too. So, choose according to the needs of the project.