The benefits of using Next.js in developing websites are adaptability and responsiveness, security, shorter load time, improved SEO, a faster development process, and better image optimisation.
Adaptable and responsive Most of the time, websites and apps designed with Next.JS meet or exceed industry-standard criteria for adaptability and responsiveness. Their capabilities include adjusting to any screen and operating on any device that triggers their use.
Secure The database and sensitive information’s security is always maintained. Any Next.js website or application will have a high level of protection built-in. There are no direct links to databases, user data, dependencies. As well as other sensitive information that may be found on the static site since it is not dynamically generated.
Shorter load time Server-side Rendering and Static Generation, together with Next.js smart data handling, make it possible to build applications that are quick to load and render data. The speed of server-side rendering is limited by the speed with which the server is able to process requests. Because static generation may be supplied through a content delivery network (CDN), it is extremely fast.
Improved SEO It also improves your SEO ranking by making the website more indexable, as well as SEO-friendly software applications.
Faster development process Clients benefit from a more efficient development process that will save them money and time.
Better image optimisation It has a built-in Automatic Image Optimisation function, which uses the image component to automatically optimise photos. WebP format is used to downsize and serve images since it’s the most up-to-date standard, and images are set up to take advantage of smaller viewports.
Gatsby Baseline Benefits You can create a git repo, open a Netlify account and have your page up an running in less than 5 minutes. Gatsby offers starters which are templates with some functionality right from the start, but building your own page from their standard starter is easy enough as it is and it easier to add on features than to remove them. Using Netlify you have continuous deployment for free, meaning that your page will have zero downtime and you can even have deploy previews to test any possibly breaking changes.
When to use Gatsby The main reason to use Gatsby is when SEO is important for your webpage. If you need to appear in google searches and get indexed better by crawlers, Gatsby is your tool. Gatsby plugins make it incredibly easy to handle image optimization, PWA functionality, integrating Google Analytics, converting markdown into content, creating meta-tags for SEO Optimization. With very few lines of code, and some easy configurations you can get all of these benefits without doing much.
Why use Gatsby If you want to create a Landing Page for a business or product, create a blog, or create an e-commerce website, Gatsby will give you the tools to have the online presence that is mission critical for any of these cases. In this day and age your page needs to be light, fast, mobile-friendly, and easy to find, which is what you get with Gatsby.
When not to use Gatsby If you want to build a service that is highly dependent on user interaction changing data, fetching data from Databases and dynamically displaying the content, go for React. Sometimes web-applications behind a sing-up wall, have no SEO concerns. Since Create React App does Client Side Rendering (CSR), any web crawler indexing for your page will get an empty page that will then create the content, making it harder to crawl and index for.
Some web applications like social-media apps, and SaaS apps, are not viable using Gatsby because Gatsby would have to build the entire web-page every time something changes, and then serve it. This would be lousy UX and by the time one build finished and served, about 100 more builds would be in line.