Level Up Your Next.js Skills: Tips and Techniques for Developers

Next.js has quickly become one of the most popular React frameworks for building production web applications. Here are some pro tips and techniques to level up your Next.js development skills.

Leveraging Built-in Routing

Next.js offers file-system based routing by default. Some best practices are:

• Place pages in the pages folder to create routes. For example, pages/about.js -> /about

• Use dynamic routes like pages/[slug].js to match parameters.

• Split larger page components into smaller reusable components in the components folder.

Static Site Generation (SSG)

Next.js allows generating static websites at build time for blazing fast performance.

• Use getStaticProps and getStaticPaths in page components to fetch data and render HTML.

• Statically generate listing pages like blogs, news while using SSR for forms.

• Use revalidate option to incrementally update static pages.

Server Side Rendering (SSR)

Next.js pre-renders pages on each request for faster initial page loads.

• Use getServerSideProps to fetch and render data on the server-side.

• Make sure to optimize queries and limit DB calls in getServerSideProps.

• Use SSG and SSR together to get best of both approaches.

Optimization Techniques

Some ways to optimize Next.js apps:

• Use next/image for optimized image loading and resizing.

• Add next-sitemap and next-seo for better SEO.

• Use next-bundles to analyze code splitting and bundles.

• Enable compression, etags, immutable headers.

• Use API routes to handle data fetching.

With these techniques, you can build high-performance Next.js apps following best practices. Let me know what other tips you have!