Advantages of Next.js Over React

Next.js is an amazing framework that is built and maintained by Vercel. It has many advantages compared to React. It allows you to build scalable apps by rendering content on the server.Next.js is already built on top of react so if you know react it’s very easy to understand it. Next.js is a full-stack framework. You won’t be just building the front end of the application but also the backend as well because Next.js provides us with a server too. I think the future of React is Next.js. It is known as the react framework for production.

Next.js simplifies the process of building a React application for production. They are:

Let us talk in detail about it.

The pages directory files are automatically routed:

And we also have nested and dynamic routes

Nested routes:

If you create nested routes in the folder still the file-based routing works the same. suppose inside a pages folder consists of another folder called ‘user’ that will render like this.

Dynamic routes:

Any file that contains bracket syntax “[ ]” will represent dynamic routes.

Ex: [file].js

To extract the blog id from the route parameter, we need to import the useRouter hook from Next.js. Blog ID can also be any string and not just a number.

By default, Next.js pre-renders every page. This means that Next.js generates HTML for each page in advance, instead of having it all done by client-side JavaScript. Pre-rendering can result in better performance and SEO.

Each generated HTML is associated with minimal JavaScript code necessary for that page. When a page is loaded by the browser, its JavaScript code runs and makes the page fully interactive. This process is called hydration.

Check That Pre-rendering Is Happening

4. Next.js app

If your app could be a plain React.js app (without Next.js), there’s no pre-rendering, therefore you won’t be ready to see the app if you disable JavaScript for instance.

PRE-RENDER: Rendering the page in advance of sending it to the browser. One of the advantages of Next.js is pre-rendering because of SEO.

By default, Next.js pre-renders every page. Compare the React and Next.js page source or HTML which is served to the browser from these apps.

Let’s look at react first. Go to the project folder and run the command npm start. This opens the React app in the browser. When the page loads we see the React logo. Let’s look at the page source. Viewing the page source only displays a div tag with an id equal to the root of the image paragraph and anchor elements are nowhere to be found. Therefore, the HTML page sent from the server is sort of empty and does not contain any data or content that we see in the browser. This is the behavior of a traditional react app.

2. Let’s compare this to Next.js. After running Next.js in the browser. You’ll see some text and a few links if you open the view source code. This means we see the different tags consisting of whatever the data is displayed in the browser and also visible in the view source code.

It is the main difference between the traditional React app and the Next.js app. This means that Next.js generates hypertext markup language for every page ahead. Pre-rendering may result in higher performance and SEO.

Having pre-rendered pages improves performance in react applications since you have to wait for the javascript to run, which would fetch data from an API, and finally render the UI, so there is a wait time for users who can be pacified by showing a loading indicator with pre-rendered pages, though the HTML is already generated so it loads faster after pre-rendering.

It helps with SEO if you’re building an application that is behind a login screen SEO might not be a concern to you however if you’re building a blog or an eCommerce site it is very important that search engines can index your context with a react app if the search engine hits your page it only sees a div tag with id equal to root if it hits a pre-rendered page through all the content is present in the source code which will help index that page leading to better search rankings now google did improve crawling pages where the content is dynamically populated like in the case of react app but it’s not the same as crawling a page where the content is already present if SEO is of concern for your app pre- rendering is definitely what you want.

Divide your web app into small chunks so you can only load the chunks that are used by the current page. Next.js already takes care of it.

Click on terminal “npm run build”, you will see a terminal like this.

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