The Advantages of Next.js Sever-Side Rendering Over Vanilla React Client-Side Rendering: Developers’ Perspective

Abstract

Using React is one of the most popular ways of developing web applications that has contributed to improving the web developers’ development experience. Over the years there have been improvements to React in the form of Next.js, which is a web framework for React. This thesis is a literature overview that explains prominent features of React and the Next.js framework, examining how Next.js extends React’s capabilities, and assess the advantages and disadvantages compared to using React alone. The improvements that Next.js adds to React consist of server-side rendering, search engine optimization, automatic code-splitting, automatic image optimizations and more. The main disadvantage that Next.js has over vanilla React is that React can be embedded into an already existing web front-end. This thesis concludes that a developer should use Next.js instead of vanilla React as they will save time and effort to developing the provided feature set of Next.js themselves. Embedded React is the only reason to use React by itself. The purpose of this thesis is to illustrate the advantages that Next.js has over vanilla React. Developers do not need to sacrifice features that are present in React since Next.js is a React framework and are able to utilize React’s capabilities such as client-side rendering when necessary.