Summary

FAQs

• How do you build a website to be performance oriented, isn't a website just a website?

  That's a good question! While a website at it's core level is just a collection of styles, images, texts, and scripts there are several ways that this content can be organized, structured, or modified to make it load much faster. For example, one of the most overlooked things on pages is image optimization, did you know that a large numbers of websites suffering from performance issues would solve many of them if they just paid appropriate attention to detail with the content that they're serving? When it comes to scripts, it's important to know which scripts are blocking others and how we can execute certain logic in parallel. JavaScript (the scripting language used to execute logic on webpages) has a unique benefit of being asynchronous, which means it is able to perform multiple actions at once. Why should your page be sitting around waiting for something to complete when it has other things to do? Components and styling, while you would think that your website is just a bunch of styles and text, the way that this is translated to the page is through DOM Elements. These elements require a certain amount of processing power, time, and memory to render effectively based on things such as size, styling, and structure. When working in a framework such as react where we have access to a "Virtual DOM" it's important to properly structure components and data in a way where we're not constantly triggering a "re-render" of this content, which would be detrimental to the user-experience.

• Why NextJS? Why not use React directly?

  This really just comes down to preference. Utilizing React directly is definitely something that I can do on request, but NextJS provides a lot of tools out of the box that enhances the developer experience and makes optimizing your website easier. It also provides several implementations for things such as Server Side Rendering, Static Optimization, and Dynamic Page Preloading which will keep your site feeling extremely snappy.