Both product owners as well as developers are often worried about the performance hassles while dealing with the ReactJS application. This is the only reason why most of you are keeping yourself away from utilizing the majestic benefits of the React framework. But, once you get a brief understanding of the performance issues and learn the optimization techniques, you will be able to leverage the potential of React easily.
React JS development is one of the most popular picks among the JS libraries used for making UIs. It offers you impeccable benefits, such as easy state management, component-based architecture and other performance challenges. But, if you are settling with React apps that have poor UC, this will negatively affect the SEO and conversion rates.
Therefore, to ensure that your ReactJS app performs optimally, there is a need for you to use some performance optimization techniques. Such techniques involve optimization of the loading time, reducing the count of re-renders and improving the responsiveness to user interactions.
To help you implement the right optimization strategies, this article brings to you some of the best techniques in hand to optimize the React apps.
What are the 5 Ways for You to Improve or Boost the ReactJS Performance?
There are various React JS development performance optimization techniques that are ideal for you to utilize the best of this framework for your performance enhancement:
1. List Virtualization or Windowing in React Apps
Most of the React apps that display or have some long lists within will eventually trigger performance lags. It is mostly because, before the app loads, the long list will render within the DOM, causing a lag in the UI and also adversely affecting the app performance of React.js. One of the most crucial ways of overcoming the bottleneck is Windowing or List Virtualization.
This is the approach which will ensure that the rendering function won’t be executed for the long component list over the app screen. With this, only a select list of restricted items will be rendered over the DOM, depending on what’s required. The two different libraries that are available for windowing are react-virtualized and react-window.
This initiative will enable the rendering of smaller subsets associated with an extensive list on the app screen. Hence, this shall improve the React app performance!
2. Make Use of Immutable Data Structures
When you hire ReactJS developers to build your business apps, you must take note of utilizing some performance optimization techniques, where using immutable data structures is one of the most integral ones. Data immutability is not just a design pattern or architecture! Instead, it is an opinionated way of framing the code!
With this initiative, you will be able to think about how you can structure the data flow of the application. Data immutability comes from a functional programming world and can be integrated onto the design of front-end applications. This initiative will bring in a lot of benefits, which include:
- Zero side-effects
- Prevents temporal coupling
- Track changes easily
- Create data objects easily
3. Implement Lazy Loading of Images within React
When the React app consists of several images, there is the possibility that the performance of your React app will degrade. This happens because DOM will be rendering all the images at a time before the interface can be displayed over the screen. This hampers the overall performance and user experience.
Therefore, it is advised that you implement lazy loading alongside your React JS development practices. The purpose of it is to make the image loading process wait until the user scrolls down to that image to see it over the screen. This way, only specific images will be rendered that are meant to appear on the screen at the present instance.
4. Minimize the Count of Re-Renders
Minimizing the count of re-renders is considered one of the most important optimization techniques within React. This involves the ability to reduce the amount of unwanted updates triggered into the DOM caused by changes within props or states. When seeking consistent re-rendering of the component, it can turn around to be an expensive option.
This technique is approached by updating several child components, and minimizing the re-renders will improve the responsiveness and performance of the application. Some techniques ideal for minimizing the re-renders within React include memorization techniques, the use of the ‘PureComponent’ class, and the implementation of the ‘shouldComponentUpdate’ method.
When you hire ReactJS developers and instruct them on enhancing the performance of your app, they will initially look out for the re-render frequency. Apart from the above techniques, they shall also use some state management tools such as MobX or Redux for minimising the cascading effects or updates, which is one of the major causes of triggering unnecessary re-renders.
5. Make Use of Functional Components
One of the most common ways of optimizing the performance of React apps is by adopting the use of functional components. It is considered a proven and straightforward tactic for building efficient or performing React apps speedily.
Future of ReactJs: Key Trends and Forecasts You Should Be Aware of Some of the experience React JS development experts suggest the idea of keeping the components small. It is because all the smaller components are often easier to test, read, reuse or maintain easily. The advantages of using some functional React components include:
- Less amount of coding is required
- Easy to understand
- Stateless components
- Testing proficiency is easy
- Better interactivity
- Flexibility of extracting smaller components
Bottom Line
There are several ways for you to optimize the React app, but these are the five best techniques that will lead you to acquire high-end performance. When you are about to implement React JS development practices for refining or improving your app performance, be assured to measure it at first.
Measuring the performance of your ReactJS app will help you see what kind of components are mounted, unmounted or updated. This shall get your developers, and you started with the overall performance enhancement journey. In case your ReactJS app performance is still lagging upon integrating these measures, make sure you hire a team of professionals and let them have a look!