Supercharge Your SEO Game: Powered By getStaticProps

This is mainly useful for websites that use React/NextJS with a CMS (Content Management System) integration. No matter, whether it's WordPress, Contentful, Prismic or any other CMS. This concept is highly relevant for companies that require non-engineers to update the content easily. Whether, it's a change in the content, A/B testing or conversion-rate-optimization related. There are many reasons why the content of a website gets updated quite often throughout the year. Right now, the content will be loaded from the CMS when a visitor gets to your website. If you have quite some content, it will take time to first load it, then process the JavaScript and ultimately render it. This will have an impact on your page-speed and therefore your SEO. Especially with requests that carry a ton of extra 'weight' such as WordPress, this is quite a problem when trying to achieve a 'perfect' performance score. Long story short, welcome to powered by NextJS. If you have worked with NextJS in the past, you are most likely familiar with . It's a lifecycle method that allows loading the content prior to rendering. There are ways to cache those pages but it can become quite tricky and messy. getStaticProps getInitialProps is part of their latest release version and offers Support. getStaticProps 9.3 Next-gen Static Site Generation (SSG) Sounds very fancy, cool, amaze-balls and quite frankly. It is pretty amazing. Coding Example When looking at a typical file-based structure that NextJS has implemented your page will look like this: fetch { ( {post.title} ) } { res = fetch( ) posts = res.json() { : { posts } } } Blog // You can use any data fetching library import from 'node-fetch' // posts will be populated at build time by getStaticProps() ( ) function Blog { posts } return {posts.map(post => ( ul ))} ul // This function gets called at build time in the Node.js environment. // It won't be called on client-side, so you can even do // direct database queries. See the "Technical details" section. export async ( ) function getStaticProps // Call an external API endpoint to get posts. const await 'https://.../posts' const await // By returning { props: posts }, the Blog component // will receive `posts` as a prop at build time return props export default As you can tell instead of being a lifecycle method getStaticProps is a function that's getting exported. Furthermore, please note that getInitialProps will not be discontinued for now but the team recommends leveraging the new methods. Fetch during build build time getStaticProps Fetch when requested & before rendering (previously - ) getServerSideProps getInitialProps specifically used to pre-render dynamic routes such as blogs. getStaticPaths Mixed Content Dynamic + Static Often times you might want to mix those two use cases. You want to leverage for landing pages but rather keep fetching the content upon a user request for use cases such as blogs and resources since those are getting updated rather often. This is not a problem. Feel free to use either one from page to page. getStaticProps Custom src Folder Are you leveraging a custom folder? This is quite usual for larger projects to have the ability to have more structure. Just export that method in addition to your component and you are good to go as well. Just make sure to add the export. src Before { Home } { Home, getStaticProps }; import from '../src/pages' export default After { Home , getStaticProps } export as default from '../src/pages' _app.js Concept This is probably the most difficult topic to find solid information and guides. First of all, this feature is not fully supported by NextJS yet. This is on purpose for right now. Therefore, if you are looking for within you won't have any luck. getStaticProps _app.js there is a way to solve this - consider it as a well working workaround. I haven't seen any issues or downsides with this approach. BUT Within your leverage the lifecycle method and within that method check whether the component has the method or and act accordingly. _app.js getInitialProps getStaticProps getServerSideProps Here's an example: MyApp.getInitialProps = ({ Component, ctx }) => { { pageProps = {}; navContent = {}; contactContent = {}; navContent = Client.getSingle( ); contactContent = Client.getSingle( ); (Component.getServerSideProps) { pageProps = Component.getServerSideProps(ctx); { : navContent.data, : contactContent.data, pageProps }; } { : navContent.data, : contactContent.data }; } (error) { .error(error); error; } }; async try // Retrieve content documents let let let await 'nav_bar' await 'contact_form' if await return navContent contactContent return navContent contactContent catch console return As you can see we are checking for and only then return . Meanwhile, we are still returning the content centrally. This is something that you can fetch statically as well. getServerSideProps pageProps navBar Previously published at https://fullerstack.io/supercharge-your-seo-game-in-2020-powered-by-getstaticprops/