Next.js

Next.js is the engine behind some of the fastest sites on the web, trusted in production by OpenAI, Twitch, and The Washington Post. Maintained by Vercel, it gives React applications everything they need to run in production: routing, rendering, caching, and deployment conventions that simply work.

Version 16, stable since late 2025, makes Turbopack the default bundler. Development servers start roughly 4x faster and pages render about 50% quicker than the previous toolchain. The release also introduces Cache Components, which let developers declare exactly which parts of a page are cached, and it requires Node.js 20 or newer.

Think of the App Router as the floor plan of your application: every page knows where it lives and what wraps around it. Routes are defined by folder structure inside the app directory, where each folder can hold a layout.tsx that frames its child routes, a page.tsx that renders content, and optional loading.tsx and error.tsx files for loading and error states.

The practical win is that layouts persist across navigation without re-rendering, so moving between pages feels smooth instead of flickering. Nested layouts fetch their own data independently, giving fine-grained control over what refreshes when your content changes.

// app/dashboard/layout.tsx
export default function DashboardLayout({
  children,
}: {
  children: React.ReactNode
}) {
  return (
    <div className="dashboard-shell">
      <Sidebar />
      <main>{children}</main>
    </div>
  )
}

Server Components do the heavy lifting on the server so your visitors' devices do less. They render to HTML before anything reaches the browser, and no component JavaScript ships to the client unless a component is explicitly marked with "use client".

For developers, this means data fetching happens directly inside component code with async/await, no client-side state machinery required. Database queries and API calls run on the server, and the finished result streams to the browser as HTML. For your customers, it means pages that appear quickly even on slow connections and older phones.

Not every page needs to be built the same way, and Next.js lets us choose the right approach page by page. Static rendering builds a page once and serves the cached copy, ideal for content that rarely changes, like your service pages. Dynamic rendering builds the page per request, which personalized dashboards and logged-in views require. Streaming sends a page in pieces as the server finishes each part, so visitors see content immediately instead of staring at a blank screen while everything loads.

Fast pages keep customers, and Next.js ships the optimization tools as standard equipment. The Image component serves correctly sized images in modern formats with lazy loading by default, often the single biggest factor in load speed. The Font module loads fonts at build time, eliminating the layout jump caused by late-arriving web fonts. The Script component defers third-party scripts so analytics and chat widgets never block your content from appearing. Together with Turbopack's faster rendering in version 16, these defaults are how we hit our Lighthouse targets on every build.

Every new Devyst project starts on Next.js 16 with the App Router and Turbopack. Server Components handle data fetching wherever possible, keeping client-side JavaScript to a minimum so your pages stay light. Route Handlers cover the API endpoints a product needs without standing up a separate service, and Cache Components keep frequently visited pages instant. The result is one consistent architecture across your marketing site, product, and API.

Where your site runs matters as much as how it is built. We deploy Next.js applications to Vercel by default, which supports every framework feature natively, including edge middleware and incremental static regeneration. If your business has specific infrastructure requirements, we deploy the same application to AWS as a containerized build or to self-hosted environments using the standalone output. You get the hosting setup that fits your compliance and cost needs, not a one-size-fits-all answer.