Beyond Flexibility: Evaluating Performance, SEO, and Architectural Trade-Offs in React and Next.js E-commerce Applications

Samyak Joshi, Pankaj Raghuvanshi

Abstract: The choice of architecture for web application development greatly affects the performance, scalability, and maintenance of contemporary online shopping platforms. The paper provides comparative research of two types of web application architectures: a client-side application created with React and a full-stack solution developed with Next.js, based on the same e-commerce application. Web application performance is measured using such web metrics as LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), FCP (First Contentful Paint), and TTFB (Time to First Byte), as well as scalability, developer experience, and SEO-friendliness. As shown by the research, although React and Next.js have similar performance under warm conditions, React is inferior in its cold performance and does not allow for search engine optimization at all.

Keywords: LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), FCP (First Contentful Paint), and TTFB (Time to First Byte), SEO (Search Engine Optimization)