Supercharge your SEO game in 2020 - powered by getStaticProps

This is mainly useful for websites that use React/NextJS with a CMS (Content Management System) integration. No matter, whether it's WordPress, Contentful, Prismic or any other CMS. This concept is highly relevant for companies that require non-engineers to update the content easily. Whether, it's a change in the content, A/B testing or conversion-rate-optimization related. There are many reasons why the content of a website gets updated quite often throughout the year.

Right now, the content will be loaded from the CMS when a visitor gets to your website. If you have quite some content, it will take time to first load it, then process the JavaScript and ultimately render it. This will have an impact on your page-speed and therefore your SEO.
Especially with requests that carry a ton of extra 'weight' such as WordPress, this is quite a problem when trying to achieve a 'perfect' performance score.

Long story short, welcome to getStaticProps powered by NextJS. If you have worked with NextJS in the past, you are most likely familiar with getInitialProps. It's a lifecycle method that allows loading the content prior to rendering. There are ways to cache those pages but it can become quite tricky and messy.

getStaticProps is part of their latest release version 9.3 and offers Next-gen Static Site Generation (SSG) Support.

Sounds very fancy, cool, amaze-balls and quite frankly. It is pretty amazing.

Coding Example

When looking at a typical file-based structure that NextJS has implemented your page will look like this:

// You can use any data fetching library
import fetch from 'node-fetch'

// posts will be populated at build time by getStaticProps()
function Blog({ posts }) {
  return (
    <ul>
      {posts.map(post => (
        <li>{post.title}</li>
      ))}
    </ul>
  )
}

// This function gets called at build time in the Node.js environment.
// It won't be called on client-side, so you can even do
// direct database queries. See the "Technical details" section.
export async function getStaticProps() {
  // Call an external API endpoint to get posts.
  const res = await fetch('https://.../posts')
  const posts = await res.json()

  // By returning { props: posts }, the Blog component
  // will receive `posts` as a prop at build time
  return {
    props: {
      posts
    }
  }
}

export default Blog

As you can tell instead of being a lifecycle method getStaticProps is a function that's getting exported.

Furthermore, please note that getInitialProps will not be discontinued for now but the team recommends leveraging the new methods.

• getStaticProps Fetch during build build time
• getServerSideProps Fetch when requested & before rendering (previously - getInitialProps)
• getStaticPaths specifically used to pre-render dynamic routes such as blogs.

Mixed Content Dynamic + Static

Often times you might want to mix those two use cases. You want to leverage getStaticProps for landing pages but rather keep fetching the content upon a user request for use cases such as blogs and resources since those are getting updated rather often. This is not a problem. Feel free to use either one from page to page.

Custom src Folder

Are you leveraging a custom src folder? This is quite usual for larger projects to have the ability to have more structure. Just export that method in addition to your component and you are good to go as well. Just make sure to add the export.

Before

import { Home } from '../src/pages'

export default { Home, getStaticProps };

After

export { Home as default, getStaticProps } from '../src/pages'

_app.js Concept

This is probably the most difficult topic to find solid information and guides. First of all, this feature is not fully supported by NextJS yet. This is on purpose for right now. Therefore, if you are looking for getStaticProps within _app.js you won't have any luck.

BUT there is a way to solve this - consider it as a well working workaround. I haven't seen any issues or downsides with this approach.

Within your _app.js leverage the lifecycle method getInitialProps and within that method check whether the component has the method getStaticProps or getServerSideProps and act accordingly.

Here's an example:

MyApp.getInitialProps = async ({ Component, ctx }) => {
  try {
    // Retrieve content documents
    let pageProps = {};
    let navContent = {};
    let contactContent = {};

    navContent = await Client.getSingle('nav_bar');
    contactContent = await Client.getSingle('contact_form');
    if (Component.getServerSideProps) {
      pageProps = await Component.getServerSideProps(ctx);
      return {
        navContent: navContent.data,
        contactContent: contactContent.data,
        pageProps
      };
    }

    return {
      navContent: navContent.data,
      contactContent: contactContent.data
    };
  } catch (error) {
    console.error(error);
    return error;
  }
};

As you can see we are checking for getServerSideProps and only then return pageProps. Meanwhile, we are still returning the navBar content centrally. This is something that you can fetch statically as well.

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This post was originally published here.