The business benefits of building web applications in React

It feels as though just about every household brand today is using React somewhere in their technological stack. Facebook, Netflix, Tesla, Airbnb, Yahoo, Paypal - the list goes on and on. In fact, according to SimilarTech, nearly 1 million websites use React today.

It’s not just big business that’s enamored with React JS, but developers prefer it too for a number of reasons:

• Write clean and simple code, especially using JSX

• Eliminate repetitiveness with reusable components

• A massive number of libraries to extend capabilities

• Handy Developer Toolkit

• Easy to learn with knowledge of other common languages

Thanks to data by stateofjs.com, you can see just how positively viewed React is in comparison to other frontend frameworks. As developers are the ones making and driving applications used by businesses to succeed, their opinions should carry a lot of weight.

But, what’s behind this love of React from major businesses? And, what advantages can it provide your business in the outside world? Let’s find out.

Speeds up development

Project delays and fumbled deadlines can not only lead to all-around confusion and a stretched budget but can also directly lead to missed opportunities. In today’s fast-paced marketplace, and particularly for startups, this can be the difference between success and failure of not just a project, but an entire business.

The main idea behind React JS seems to be making the development of network-facing apps faster and easier. The fact that it seamlessly works with the most common web languages, such as JavaScript and HTML using the JSX syntax extension supports this. There are a number of other characteristics of React JS that help accelerate development:

• Heavy promotion of reusable components eliminates repeating the same work

• Develop native apps for other platforms with a single codebase using React Native

Many of these aspects carry their benefits across multiple projects - such as the ability to reuse components. React JS’ modular structure also means it’s easier to maintain over time. Not to mention the fact that the performance, SEO, maintenance, and other benefits discussed below reduces the time conventionally spent on these tasks.

Long-term stability for your technological stack

It’s safe to say that with the rapid growth React has experienced over the last 8 years as well as the massive support of the developer and business communities behind it, React isn’t going anywhere soon. It’s already outlived, or mostly out-maneuvered, a number of competing technologies, such as Backbone, Ember, and Vue.

While it’s not a dinosaur, 7 years as a popular open-source technology has resulted in React JS maturing immensely into not only a convenient JS-based framework but an entire ecosystem complete with handy libraries, a solid developer toolkit as well as an active and committed community. With regular updates released every year, it’s very much still an alive project. 

While no one can tell the long-term future of the IT industry, chances are you won’t face a major shakeup in the medium-to-long-term if developing with React.

React has become somewhat of an industry-standard. Although it’s always preferable to stick with a single development team for a project, you won’t be vendor-locked if you build a product using React JS. Thanks to its clean code and component-based architecture, it’s not as challenging to handover as other technologies.

Scales with your project or business

Once again, thanks to its support for reusable components and one-directional data flow, React JS applications lend themselves exceedingly well to being built onto with time. If you have a solid foundation to work from, you can conveniently develop new components and structures and add them to your existing main branch without compromising it or having to rework major components.

This same characteristic is what makes React so scale so well with projects of different sizes. Not much changes when working with React JS to build dynamic frontends, whether it’s at the scale of a simple business website or implementing feature-rich, enterprise-grade applications.

This means it’s a technology you can use from early startup days throughout the growth cycle of your business.

Performance

Further good news for both businesses and developers is that React JS is by its very nature an optimized programming framework. For developers and project managers, this means less time spent on optimizing web applications as well as the ability to develop more complex and dynamic UIs without taking as big of a performance hit. 

From a business perspective, this helps to increase development time and reduce complexity. It also means businesses don’t have to compromise on delivering beautiful and dynamic web applications for performance concerns. And, that React is great at handling the strain high-volume applications are often under.

Thanks to server-side rendering, React JS performs faster before and after loading, so the benefits extend to both static and dynamic applications. With as many as 53% of users abandoning a site that takes more than 3s to load, performance has a very real business impact. 

SEO-Friendly

No internet-facing business can ignore the tremendous sway search engine rankings have over their ability to compete online and get noticed. Increasingly, SEO rankings are not only being determined by on-page and off-page techniques, but also by user-experience metrics and even the underlying code of web applications.

Page loading speed is already a direct ranking factor for Google which gives you an advantage using an optimized framework like React.

Traditionally, search engines face difficulty crawling JavaScript-intensive applications. However, by rendering the application as a normal web page server-side and then returning a virtual DOM to the browser, React largely bypasses this issue. In short, it provides clean as well as human and machine-readable code for search engines to crawl and index.

Conclusion

What should become clear is that React’s benefits don’t end in the development stage. Its advantages span multiple fronts of your business, from competing for search engine rankings to improving user experiences with your products to managing and scaling your development efforts across different projects. 

React allows front-end developers to deliver interactive and beautifully crafted web application front ends without compromise. It’s also a mature, yet evolving technology that future-proofs any project.

Recognizing these facts is why we at Touchtribe use React JS to build our client solutions. React empowers us to deliver cutting-edge web applications that in turn empowers our clients to reach their maximum potential online.