6 Best Practices to Follow Before Deploying Next.js to Production 🚀

Read this guide to get useful insights and best practices on how to prepare your Next.js site for production!

Next.js is a flexible framework based on React, a JavaScript library for building interactive user interfaces1. It provides the building blocks to create fast web applications.

Is important your team or team's know how to optimize the application for end-users.

In this post, you will dig into the commons strategies and best practices to deploy Next.js to production!

1. Use always Image Optimization

next/image exposes an component that extends the traditional HTML element with automatic image optimization capabilities.

2. Use Font Optimization

next/font optimizes local fonts and removes external network requests for improved privacy and performance. As of Next.js 13, it supports self-hosting on any Google Font to avoid making requests to retrieve font files from Google.

3. Use Script Optimization

next/script offers a component that extends the traditional HTML tag by allowing JavaScript scripts to be loaded only once across multiple pages.

4. Integrate an Analytics or APM Tool

Once a Next.js site is in production, you need a way to track its performance. In particular, you should have a system in place to monitor page views and get information about site traffic.

When deploying to Vercel, you can achieve that with Next.js Speed Insights. This tool allows you to analyze and measure the performance of your application’s pages using various metrics.

5. Enable Error Handling With Custom 500 and 400 Pages

Like any other application, Next.js sites are subject to errors. One of the most important aspects of error handling is presenting meaningful error messages to users to inform them of what happened. When an error occurs in the frontend or backend, Next.js displays static 500 page.

6. Optimize Page SEO Performance With Lighthouse

The ultimate goal of most Next.js sites is to produce excellent SEO results. Google has changed its approach to SEO performance evaluation a great deal over time, and it now focuses primarily on Core Web Vitals:

READ MORE: https://www.codemotion.com/magazine/frontend/optimize-next-js-for-production/