Pros and Cons of Next JS – 2023 Updated Version

Introduction

Web technologies are growing and changing almost on a monthly basis. Making any decision requires knowing each option beforehand, and it’s becoming more challenging to make a good choice with confidence. Today, we would like to present the pros and cons of Next JS – React powered javascript framework that helps you build a truly outstanding and customized user experience easier.

What is NextJS?

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

What’s more, you can practically forget about choosing between a static site 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-side rendered pages as well as statically generated ones.

Next is one of the most popular React frameworks for creating server-side rendering web apps.

What is Next js used for? Choosing NextJS comes with three main advantages:

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

Next.js is a choice of big names like Netflix or Uber as well as smaller companies that 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 with wanting more. Now, look at the list below and ask yourself whether at least one of these goals is your goal.

To Get Better Business Results

• Improve Your Visibility in Search Engines: Next.js supports server-side rendering (SSR), enabling better indexing by search engines and improving visibility in search results.
• Enhance User Experience: Next.js ensures fast loading and high page performance, resulting in an excellent user experience and increased user engagement.
• Reduce Maintenance Costs: Next.js provides a streamlined development experience and built-in optimizations, reducing the need for extensive maintenance efforts. 

To Improve the Development Process 

• Scalability Made Easy: Next.js simplifies app scaling, allowing it to effortlessly handle high traffic loads and adapt to growing user demands. With serverless deployment options, scalability becomes a seamless process.
• Optimal Performance: By providing advanced performance optimization techniques like static site generation (SSG) and server-side rendering (SSR), Next.js ensures fast page loads and smooth user experiences.
• Accelerated Development: Next.js provides a wide set of out-of-the-box features that improve development cycles. Developers can choose built-in solutions for routing, state management, and styling, reducing the need for manual configuration and third-party dependencies.
• Thriving Community Support: The dynamic Next.js community offers a wealth of resources, support, and readily available solutions. Developers can tap into this community-driven ecosystem to find answers, share knowledge, and leverage community-developed packages, streamlining their development process.
• Enhanced Security: Next.js prioritizes security by enabling server-side rendering (SSR) and enforcing best practices in data handling. This ensures protection against client-side vulnerabilities and strengthens the overall security posture of web applications.
• Flexible Architecture: While Next.js aligns seamlessly with the Jamstack architecture, it offers flexibility in building your digital solutions. Developers can embrace server-side rendering (SSR) and dynamic routing when needed, allowing them to tailor their applications to specific project requirements.

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 with both pros and cons so that you can make an informed decision.

Next.js and Jamstack

Next.js also became one of the most popular Static Site Generators.

In other words, it’s one of the best frameworks now for building superfast and SEO-friendly Jamstack websites.

If you want to learn more about Jamstack, we ran an interview with one of the Jamstack community experts – Colby Fayock.

Want to go even deeper? Check out our “What is Jamstack” guide.

Pros of NextJS

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

Let’s break them down.

Benefits of Next.js for Corporate Venture Building Projects

Corporate venture building projects are gaining significant rates as organisations seek to introduce technical innovations and achieve sustainable growth. Next.js, a powerful React framework, offers compelling advantages for this kind of project: 

• Accelerating MVP Development – Building a robust MVP is usually the first step in a new corporate venture development process. Next.js provides a strong foundation for rapid development cycles, allowing you to iterate, validate, and refine ideas efficiently. As a result, you can enter the market and validate business concepts much faster.

• Superior User Experience – In the competitive landscape of the digital world we live in, delivering exceptional user experiences is crucial. Next.js shines here, offering features like client-side rendering, dynamic routing, and automatic code splitting. These capabilities enable smooth transitions, faster page loading times, and improved interactivity, resulting in highly engaging user interfaces. So you can create amazing digital experiences that captivate users and differentiate your venture from the competition.

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Excellence: Establishing a strong online presence is crucial for corporate venture building. Next.js provides built-in support for server-side rendering, ensuring search engines can effectively crawl and index pages. This SEO-friendly nature allows you to maximize the visibility of your product from the early stages, boosting organic traffic and enhancing brand awareness.

• Modular Architecture and Reusability:  Building new ventures usually requires high development efficiency and cutting costs as much as possible, so efficient collaboration and code reuse are highly required. Next.js adopts a modular architecture, empowering development teams to build applications using reusable components. This approach streamlines development efforts, enhances code maintainability, and fosters collaboration among multiple teams working on various project initiatives.

• Thriving Developer Ecosystem: Next.js benefits from a vibrant developer community and an extensive ecosystem of plugins and libraries. Designers can tap into this ecosystem to leverage pre-built components, integrations, and tools, accelerating development efforts and enhancing the functionality of their innovations. This enables the venture teams to rapidly prototype and integrate innovative features.

• Scalability for Future Growth: As corporate venture building projects evolve, scalability becomes a critical consideration. Next.js provides a scalable architecture that accommodates growing user bases and evolving business needs. You can confidently build your venture with Next.js, knowing that it will support your projects’ expansion and future market disruption.

Benefits 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.

Using Next.JS 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 a 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 web apps.
• Support on demand – the popularity of Next js development services 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.

What Marketers can get from NextJS

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 web 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.

Next.js provides marketers with the tools and capabilities to create a unique user experience that drives engagement, conversions, and brand loyalty. Marketers can benefit from dynamic routing and automatic code splitting to optimise content delivery, personalise experiences, and deliver targeted campaigns.

The flexibility and scalability of Next.js enable them to adapt quickly to changing market trends, launch landing pages and promotional campaigns with ease, and enhance overall marketing effectiveness.

By harnessing the power of Next.js, marketers can elevate their digital marketing efforts, improve customer acquisition and retention, and drive business growth. 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 a custom storefront is something that marketers can use for differentiation from the competition.

Pros of NextJS for Developers

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

We will start with the newest Next.js release! Next.js App router – this new paradigm of building apps was released at the beginning of May 2023 [earlier was available as a beta testing version]. We can say it opens the doors to upgraded developer experience, rendering performance, and the mental model. This update brought new benefits, like: 

• Streaming app elements to the user – thanks to using React Server Components, app elements can be streamed to the customers in a blink of an eye, so they can interact with an app without waiting for the full load
• Rapid render of the application using static rendering 
• Enhanced development efficiency thanks to the server-centring routing
• Server Components allow you to define components that execute on the server during rendering and then stream updates to the client. This process provides benefits such as improved initial load times, reduced JavaScript bundle sizes, and improved SEO.

However, there’s more:

• CSS parser – developers can import CSS files from a JavaScript file. New pares improved the handling of CSS and showed errors that would previously slip through.
• Fast refresh – edits made on React components are visible within seconds.
• Built-in Image Component and Automatic Image Optimization – this feature automatically optimises images. It now supports AVIF images, enabling 20% smaller images compared to WebP.
• Community support – the popularity of NextJS is growing, and so is the number of its contributors. Thanks to that, instead of solving something from scratch, developers can find probably already existing solutions.
• A hybrid of server-side rendering SSR and static site generation SSG – prerender pages at build time or request time in a single project.
• Incremental Static Regeneration – it allows web 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 – NextJS provides automatic compilation and bundling. In other words, it is optimised for production right from the start.
• Data fetching – rendering content in different ways, depending on the app’s use case. This includes both pre-rendering with server-side rendering or static site generation and updating or creating content at runtime with incremental static regeneration.
• API routes –  easy creation of API endpoint as a Node.js serverless function.
• Code splitting – reduce the size of your app’s first payload by splitting the code and serving components only when needed.
• Rust-based compiler SWC – transform and minify your JavaScript code for production. Next.js includes a brand new Rust compiler, that has optimized bundling and compiling with ~3x faster refreshes locally and ~5x faster builds for production.
• Middleware – enables to use of code over configuration, so you can run code before a request is completed. You can change the response of requests and redirect the user from one route to another.

Summary of NextJS pros

Disadvantages of 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 many 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.
• 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 many 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.

We’ve made the entire article about the comparison between Next.js and Gatsby.js, as well as the video if you prefer it:

The other famous alternative is just using React. Or to be clear: create react app. Here’s a comparison between Next.js and Create React App (CRA).

Read more

Next js vs Angular – Comparison

What is Next js used for and why? – Guide through the technology

Why Next js? – Improve your SEO and rank higher in Google.

18 great examples of Next js websites