How to optimize your Next.js site: Tips from industry leaders

Optimizing your Next.js site for performance and efficiency can be complicated, but a good developer toolkit can help. Hear from some of the experts from this year’s Next.js Conf to see how you can best use React Server Components, the latest in web UI, powerful layouts, and more to create a world-class website.  


Next.js is known as a frontend framework, but it has powerful backend capabilities, too. The CEO of Ping, Theo Browne, shares exactly how Next.js can be used as a backend framework in his presentation. Tune in to see how he compares backend tools with other technologies and explores the tight integration between the frontends and backends he builds.

Want to see how other developers would write a frontend component system? Tru Narla, a Software Engineer at Discord, shares that and more. Tru explains how to build a design system using Tailwind, HeadlessUI, and CVA. You’ll even learn how to conditionally render certain styles within the system by having JavaScript control the underlying CSS. Watch until the end to see how Tru uses Storybook to handle components in isolation.


With so much landing in web browsers for CSS and HTML this year, this talk will help you stay on top of what's new. Una Kravets from Google Chrome guides you through which new features make it easier to build and style UI controls. Give this one a watch to learn about:

- cascade layers

- accent-color

- subgrid

- :has()

- container queries

- OpenUI

Since it was first released, Next.js has led the way in building JavaScript apps with fast initial page loads. But in the process of speeding up sites by serving decoupled pages, we lost some of the benefits of React's component tree when building nested UIs. In this talk, the founder of Build UI, Sam Selikoff, shows by example how nested layouts with Next.js 13 bring the benefits of React’s component tree back to the forefront while improving both the DX and UX of your Next.js applications.

Building for success can be tough. However, thanks to tools like Next.js, Vercel, and Sanity.io, you can build confidently—knowing that your project will scale. Kapehe, a Senior Developer Relations Specialist at Sanity.io, explains how you can empower your team to publish content without sacrificing the developer experience. Watch her talk to learn how to quickly add a content authoring tool to Next.js using Sanity Studio v3. 


Take the next step

Once you’ve made your way through the talks above, take a look at the rest of this year’s Next.js Conf presentations.

If you’re ready for your team to start creating with Next.js on Vercel, sign up for a Pro trial