Best Practices in NextJS

Which of these best practices is provided by NextJS as part of the framework?

Next.js is a powerful framework for building React applications and provides many best practices and features out of the box, which makes the developer’s job easier and the code more maintainable. Here are some of the best practices from React that are inherently provided or facilitated by Next.js:

  1. Code Splitting and Route Based Lazy Loading: Next.js automatically splits your code at the level of pages. For each page, Next.js generates a JavaScript bundle, meaning only the necessary code is loaded for each page. This can greatly improve performance.

  2. Server Side Rendering (SSR) and Static Site Generation (SSG): Next.js provides a straightforward way to create server-side rendered and statically generated websites. This can improve performance and SEO, and is often more difficult to implement manually in a standard React app.

  3. Performance Optimizations: Next.js automatically optimizes your application for the best performance by implementing features like automatic minification of JavaScript and CSS, prefetching of linked pages, and more.

  4. Path Alias and Absolute Imports: Next.js supports configuring your project to use absolute paths or path aliases out of the box. This helps avoid relative path imports becoming cumbersome in deeply nested files.

  5. API Routes: Next.js provides a solution for building API endpoints within the same repo as your Next.js project. This can help encapsulate backend functionality into your project and keep everything in one place.

  6. Built-in CSS and Sass Support, and CSS-in-JS: Next.js provides built-in support for CSS and Sass, as well as support for any CSS-in-JS library, like Styled Components or Emotion.

  7. Environment Variables: Next.js has a built-in way to share environment variables between the server and browser, and to load different environment variables for development and production.

  8. Image Optimization: With the next/image package, Next.js provides an automatic solution for optimizing images, which is an important part of web performance.

  9. Fast Refresh: Next.js includes Fast Refresh, which is a feature that quickly refreshes the page as you edit the code, maintaining the state of your components.

While Next.js takes care of many best practices automatically, it’s important to note that other best practices, such as using the key prop in lists, maintaining state immutability, using PropTypes, etc., are still the responsibility of the developer.