Pros and Cons of NextJS in 2021

Introduction

Web technologies are growing and changing almost on a monthly basis.

Making any decision requires knowing the pros and cons of each option beforehand, and it's becoming more challenging to make a good decisions with confidence.

Today, we would like to present the pros and cons of Next JS - React powered framework that helps you build truly outstanding and customized user experience easier.

What is NextJS?

NextJS is a framework built on top of React to help developers with creating performant applications and superfast static websites.

What’s more, you can practically forget about choosing between static and dynamic thanks to Automatic Static Optimization. With this feature, these terms are kind of merged into one because it allows for building a hybrid application with server-rendered pages as well as statically generated ones.

Choosing NextJS comes with three main advantages:

• Better user experience
• Above-average performance
• Rapid feature development

Next is a choice of big names like Netflix or Uber as well as smaller companies which are just starting. In other words, no matter what stage you are right now, you can use NextJS however, sometimes it might be excessive.

When to use NextJS?

To answer this question, you should know what you want to achieve. It doesn’t have to be just one goal – there is nothing wrong about wanting more.

Now, look at the list below and ask yourself whether at least one of these goals is your goal.

Goals you can achieve with NextJS:

• Increase of conversion rate and sales
• Boost of marketing channels
• Overtake of competition
• Better user experience
• Lower maintenance costs
• Easier business scaling

It’s achievable because NextJS gives its users rich possibilities which means a long list of pros. However, like any other technology, Next comes also with cons.

And this blog post aims to present you both pros and cons so that you can make an informed decision.

Pros of NextJS

NextJS is loved not only by developers but also business owners and marketers. These three groups have different goals they want to achieve and therefore are interested in other pros NextJS can offer them.

Let’s break them down.

Pros of NextJS for business owners

We can confidently say that every company wants to increase its conversion rate, which directly impacts sales. To do that, these companies need to use modern technologies to build a truly unique user experience with actual and potential customers in mind.

NextJS helps to do so because it offers them total control over the final design of their websites, online stores, applications and other digital products. Additionally, you are not limited by such things as themes or plugins dedicated to a specific eCommerce platform or Content Management System (CMS).

Other pros of NextJS for businesses include:

• Adaptability and responsiveness – both these things are fundamental to great user experience and mean that websites and applications adjust to the screen size of the device.
• Data security – websites created with NextJS are static, which means there is no direct connection to the database, dependencies, user data or any other sensitive information. This ensures data security.
• Faster time to market – NextJS is a great way of creating MVP as fast as possible thanks to many premade components. This way of building allows you to get feedback quickly and improve your product accordingly without wasting both time and money.
• Fully omnichannel – websites and apps created with NextJS are accessible from any device so you can sell your products and services through different sales channels.
• Short page load time – static websites are fast by nature, so visitors and customers will be content with the performance of NextJS websites and apps.
• Support on demand – the popularity of React as well as NextJS is growing so is the number of developers. Because of that, it will be easy to find an agency or freelancer to make some changes if needed.

Pros of NextJS for marketers

Because business owners are interested in increasing conversion rate, marketers are being held accountable for efforts to increase it. And to do that, they need – among other things – SEO efficiency and organic traffic growth.

Using NextJS gives marketers both these things as websites and applications are fast, light and easy to scan, which plays a crucial role in improving Google rankings. And as Google rankings improve, so is the organic traffic, which eventually leads to higher conversion and sales numbers.

Another thing worth mentioning is a unique user experience. Thanks to it, all marketing efforts will result in a better return on investment (ROI). It will be expressly visible, especially in the eCommerce industry, where many online stores look similar and creating custom storefront is something that marketers can use for differentiation from the competition.

Pros of NextJS for developers

At last, we have pros for developers, arising from many features that NextJS offers. Devs are incredibly excited about reusable components which cut development time and cost.

However, there’s more:

• CSS support built-in – developers can import CSS files from a JavaScript file.
• Built-in Image Component and Automatic Image Optimization – this feature automatically optimises images using the new next/image component.
• Community support – the popularity of NextJS is growing, and so is the number of its contributors. This is much help because instead of solving something from scratch, developers can look for a solution that is probably already available.
• Fast Refresh – fast, live-editing experience. 
• Hybrid of SSR and SSG – prerender pages at build time or request time in a single project.
• Incremental Static Generation – it allows developers to update existing pages by re-rendering them in the background as traffic comes in. This way, static content can become dynamic.
• TypeScript support – automatic TypeScript configuration and compilation.
• Zero Config – focus on the business logic of your NextJS app instead of the application logic. And to help you, it provides automatic compilation and bundling. In other words, Next is optimised for production right from the start.

Summary of NextJS pros

Cons of using NextJS

Although NextJS is developing rapidly and many features arrive, it still has some cons and issues which you can see below:

• Cost of flexibility – Next JS does not provide much built-in front pages, so you have to create the whole front-end layer from the ground up.
• Development and Management – if you want to use NextJS to build an online store, yet you don’t have an in-house team of developers, you will need a dedicated person to handle the development and management afterwards.
• It’s opinionated – NextJS is limited to use only its file-based router, you can’t modify the way it deals with routes. Therefore, if you want to use dynamic routes, you need Node.js server.
• Lack of built-in state manager – therefore, if you need a state manager, you also need Redux, MobX or something like that.
• Low on plug-ins – in comparison to Gatsby.js, you cannot use much of easy-to-adapt plugins.

Alternative to NextJS

Whether to use Next JS for your next app or website or not depends on what you are aiming for. Next is great when you want to have a static website with a lot of updates.

However, sometimes it's better to consider using Gatsby – especially if you aren't planning to update the website frequently.

Comments

[Richard S Prins Jr.]

With a little work with webpack and a catchall route at the index.ja, you can treat this as an SPA similar to CRA, using react-router