You probably have heard about NextJS once or twice before. It’s a new framework that builds on top of React and solves some of the problems that were not addressed in its precursor. To be able to learn NextJS you should have at least a basic understanding of React, so make sure to check out the React section of Upmostly to fill any gaps in knowledge you may have.

Server-side rendering

One of the main advantages and selling points of NextJS is the introduction of server-side rendering. In NextJS the first page that the user is about to see is generated in advance.

SEO

Traditional Single Page Applications are rendered on the client-side as the user is interacting with our page. This makes it super difficult to build search engine optimized pages as the bots that are indexing the pages are having a difficult time seeing all of the available content for the users.

Speed

The time taken to see the first contentful paint is much shorter with NextJS than with React. React web pages take a bit too long to load when you’re opening them for the first time. This is a poor user experience that NextJS is massively improving upon. NextJS is much faster overall than React.

TypeScript

NextJs also supports TypeScript by default. Static typing is not implemented in React by default so if you want to implement TS across your application then you need to spend a lot of time and effort configuring it properly. This problem is simply non existing with NextJS as it comes with pre-built TS.

👋 Hey, I'm Dawid Budaszewski

Hello! I'm Dawid. I'm a full-stack developer with a couple of years of experience under my belt. I spent most of my career working with React. I also built reacterry.com, an online portal with React coding challenges.