Introduction
Learning about Next.js takes you one step ahead and lets you be very flexible in building and adapting to online reality. People want to get things done as quickly as possible. Internet users want their page to load in no time. That is where Next.js comes into play. Next.js allows you to build superfast, both simple and complex applications much faster and easier. It provides an amazing user experience and much better SEO efficiency.
What is Next.js
Next.js is a React framework which is perfect for building fast and user-friendly static websites and web applications using React. The Next.js frontend framework has been around for only a couple of years, but it is already one of the most popular tools in the React ecosystem. Thanks to automatic static optimization feature Next.js has, it is possible to build hybrid applications with both statically generated and server-rendered pages and that makes your website or web application run faster and be more user-friendly. Next.js is commonly used among the most popular and successful companies all over the world such as Uber, Netflix, Starbucks or Twitch.We should also mention that the popularity of next.js is growing insanely day over day.
Benefits of Next.js
- Automatic Code Splitting
Next.js can understand and only load the needed javascript and CSS for any given page. That allows the page to load much more faster as the browser doesn't have to download Javascript and CSS that it doesn't need for the specific page. This increases the performance and decreases the page loading time.
- Server Side Rendering(SSR)
With next.js's server side rendering feature react components that appear to the user are all being initially rendered by the server. This means that once the html has been delivered to the user's browser, there is nothing else to be done and the content is ready for user to read. Thanks to that feature page loading times decrease insanely.
One of the other benefits that Server Side Rendering (SSR) provides is an indexable and crawlable website which is very important for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as the client side javascript doesn't need to be executed to see the page content.
- Hot Module Replacement
This feature allows developers to see any changes they have made during development, live in the application as soon as they have been made. However it protects the state of the application and reloads only the changed part of the application and reduce the amount of time required to see changes in action.
- Routing
One of the best features of next.js is about url routing of a website. Next.js arranges the url based on the page's file name on the server automatically and that makes life a lot easier for developers. It can even generate urls with dynamic properties and for generating pages which have the same style but different content Next.js is the perfect choice.
New Groundbreaking Features Comes With Next.js version 12
- URL Imports
New version of Next.js (v12) comes with url import support which means that from now on it will be possible to import images or libraries directly from urls and we dont have to use npm and install de dependency in order to use it.
- Middleware
Caching rendered html is the best way to build a website for better performances but the thing is we can not make websites dynamic that way. Next.js uses server side rendering in order to make websites dynamic but it comes with a price and effects the performance of the webapp in a bad way. However with the new version of Next.js (v12) thanks to the middleware feature which uses serverless functions now it is possible to create dynamic and fast webapps and websites.
- Suspense Support
Suspense is a react component which is used for waiting for asynchronous data before rendering it’s children. This component is still at the stage of testing but some companies like facebook uses it. Older versions of next.js didn’t support suspense component because it didn’t play well with server. With Next.js v12 you can use that component freely and as you want.
- Server Components
Server components are htmls which are being rendered in the server. What is interesting about Next.js v12 server components is it uses http streaming and renders the webpage progressively. That decreases the amount of time you wait for component render.
To sum up, Next.js is a great choice to build up your website or web app because it makes the development part very easy. It is a tool which facilitate Search engine optimization process. It reduce the amount of time required to see the content of a page. It uses React library which is well known and which has a huge community.