Next.js Development Done Right

Next.js gives you server-side rendering and static generation (so Google sees real content), file-based routing, image and font optimization, edge middleware, server actions, streaming, and a deployment story that's mostly invisible. For anything that touches the public internet — marketing surface, SEO target, marketing-led product — Next.js is the safer default. Plain React (with Vite) is the right choice only for fully authenticated internal tools where SEO doesn't matter.

App Router for every new project in 2026. It's where Vercel is investing, server components solve real problems, the data-fetching primitives are better, and the ecosystem has caught up. We migrate Pages Router projects to App Router incrementally when it's worth doing, but we don't force the migration on a stable codebase that doesn't need it.

Yes — we run a route-by-route incremental migration. The existing app stays live the entire time. We move routes behind a proxy or via Next.js rewrites, ship one at a time to staging, validate parity, and cut over once the new path is proven. No big-bang rewrites, no two-month freeze on feature work, no all-or-nothing risk. Most migrations finish in 8-14 weeks depending on the size of the surface.

Vercel is our default — it's built by the same team behind Next.js and the DX advantage is enormous (preview URLs per PR, edge functions, image optimization, ISR caching, analytics, all just work). We also deploy to AWS (with the Open Next adapter or Lambda + CloudFront), Cloudflare Workers, and self-hosted Docker on a Hetzner / Fly / Railway box when the situation requires it. We help clients choose the deployment target during scoping.

URLs are sacred. We map every existing URL to its new equivalent, set 301 redirects for changes, preserve every meta tag and structured data block, regenerate the sitemap and submit it to Search Console, and run a side-by-side crawl of old vs new before cutover to catch anything missed. We've migrated marketing sites without losing rankings — it's mostly process discipline, not luck.

On marketing surfaces, yes — and we treat the Lighthouse budget as a release gate, not a launch checkbox. On heavily interactive applications (dashboards, editors, real-time UI), some Lighthouse metrics are harder to score perfectly because the workload is genuinely heavy — we focus on INP, LCP, and CLS for those, with explicit budgets. We share before/after WebPageTest runs on every performance engagement.

Yes — Vitest for unit and integration tests, Testing Library for components, Playwright for end-to-end coverage of critical user paths, and Lighthouse / Web Vitals checks gating CI. Coverage targets scale with the criticality of the surface — payments and core flows get heavy coverage, rarely-used admin screens get less. We don't chase a coverage percentage; we chase confidence.

Carefully. The Next.js fetch caching, route segment config, and revalidate semantics are powerful but easy to get wrong. We set explicit cache strategies per route, document them in code comments, and instrument cache hit rates so we know what's actually happening in production. When you're getting stale data or unexpected SSR, the answer is usually in the caching layer — we make it visible rather than mysterious.

A focused marketing-site rebuild ships in 4-6 weeks. A full SaaS application runs 8-14 weeks depending on scope. An incremental migration from CRA or Pages Router takes 8-12 weeks while keeping the existing app live. We commit to dates during scoping, demo weekly, and ship to the schedule we agreed in week one.