React js best practices to follow in 2024
The year is 2024 and while ReactJS was initially released in 2013 but still after almost a decade, ReactJS still is popularly used as a Javascript library and its popularity is certainly not going to decrease anytime soon. Since it is still an extremely popular Javascript library for creating amazing user interfaces when building web applications, It has been widely used by many companies ranging from large enterprises to trend-setting startups and has an active community.
Now as a ReactJS developer, understanding how the library works in its entirety isn’t the only thing you need to build projects that are user-friendly, easily scalable, and maintainable.
It’s also necessary to understand certain conventions and standards that will enable you to write clean React code. This will not only help you serve your clients or your orgnanisation better, but it’ll make it easier for you and other developers working on the project to maintain the code base.
In this article, we will start by talking about some of the common challenges React developers face, and then dive into some of the best practices you can follow to help you write React code in a more efficient way.
Let’s get started below :
Challenges FACED BY ReactJS Developers :
In this section, we will discuss some of the major challenges faced by ReactJS Developers during and after building of web apps. Some of the common challenges are :
1 ) Entry Barrier To Learn ReactJS
Lets be honest…ReactJS is not exactly an easy to learn language for beginners . So before you even get to learn ReactJS, you have to make sure that you should be well versed in HTML, CSS and Javascript. After learning these 3 things, you still need to know about JSX to make the understanding of ReactJS better. An added advantage(though not compulsory) is to make sure that you are also aware of modern CSS framework like Tailwind.
Now, if you thought that just being aware of the above mentioned things is enough to get started with ReactJS, well here is where you are wrong. Because the following concepts are far more crucial for you to make sure to understand ReactJS better. The following are the concepts that you should be well versed in as well :
- Arrow Functions
- Rest operator
- Spread Operator
- Modules
- Destructuring
- Array methods
- Template literals
- Promises
- let and const variables
While all this may seem overwhelming to you at first, believe me, with enough hard work,practice and learning it will indeed be easy to be familiar with these concepts and become adept at ReactJS sooner
2 ) STATE MANAGEMENT
Updating the state or value of your variables in ReactJS works differently from how you would do it using vanilla javascript. State management basically refers to the process of handling and controlling the data or state. State represents the dynamic data that can change over time. State management becomes very crucial as applications grow in complexity, and various components need to share and update data
3 ) MAINTAINABILITY & SCALaBILITY
In the software world, often user requirements of a product continues to change and because of this, there is always the need to introduce changes to the code that makes up the product.
It’s often difficult to scale your code when that code isn’t easy for the team to maintain. Difficulties like these arise from following bad practices when writing your code. They may seem to work perfectly at first, giving you the desired result, but anything that works “for now” is inefficient for the future and growth of your project. Hence while writing ReactJS code, it is extremely important to make sure the maintainability & scalability of the code is maintained
Now, that we have looked at the few and common challenges faced by the ReactJS developers, let us now have a look at some best practices to make sure how to write ReactJS code that will improve our applications and make their performance better and seamlessly.
REACTJS BEST PRACTICES :
Based on my experience as a ReactJS Developer, I can think of at least 13 best practice of ReactJS. They are as follows :
1. Maintain A Clear Folder & FILE Structure
By maintaining a clear folder and file structures will help you and other developers working with you to understand the arrangement of files and assets being used in a project clearly without much issues.
With the help of a good folder structure, it’s easy to navigate around easily, saving time and helping avoid confusion amongst the team and it will also help when the project is scaled tremendously.
2. HAVE a Structured Import Order
As the complexity and scope of your React application continues to grow, you are sure to make extra imports. The structure of your imports will go a long way in helping you understand what makes up your components.
Try to group similar utilities together to avoid confusion and chaos. For example, you can group external or third party imports separately from local imports.
3. STICK To Naming Conventions
By following a naming convention for your ReactJS project, it will greatly help in improving the code readability. This means that you must adhere to the naming conventions in your variables, components, hooks etc. The most commonly used naming conventions are camelCase and PascalCase.
4. Use a Linter
Using a linter tool helps in code readability and improves the code quality . ESLint is one of the most popular linter tools for ReactJS. A Linter tool helps in having a consistency in a code base. By having a tool like Linter, you can set the rules you want every developer working on the project to follow. The tool observes your code and then notifies you when a rule has been broken. The keyword or line that breaks the rule would usually be underlined in red. Since every developer has their own style of coding, linter tools can help with code uniformity. Linter tools can also help us fix bugs easily. Tools like ESLint are built into most code editors.
5. Employ Snippet Libraries
Snippet libraries can make development faster by providing prebuilt code that developers use often. or instance, if you want to create a React functional component without typing out all the code, all you need to do using the extension is type rfce and hit Enter. This command will go on to generate a functional component with a name that corresponds with the file name . Another useful snippet tool is the Tailwind CSS IntelliSense extension, which simplifies the process of styling web pages with Tailwind CSS. The extension can help you with autocompletion by suggesting utility classes, syntax highlighting, and linting functionalities. You can even see what your colors look like while coding.
6. Combine CSS and JavaScript
When working on large projects, using different stylesheet files for each component can make your file structure bulky and very hard to navigate around. One good solution to this problem is to combine your CSS and JSX code. You can use frameworks/libraries like Tailwind CSS for this
7. Limit Component Creation
Code reusability is one of the core features of ReactJS. You can create a component and reuse its logic as many times as possible without rewriting that logic. So, keeping this in mind, you should always limit the number of components you create else it will bloat the file structure with unnecessary files that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
8. Implement CODE SPLITTING
Code splitting can be very useful to your React app as it grows. When you have a large codebase and the size of your reactjs project increases so does the load time of your web page also increases and it ultimately slows down your app.
Reactjs by default bundles and deploys the whole application. But we can change this behavior using code splitting
Basically, you can limit what section of your app gets loaded at a particular point. This is accomplished by splitting your bundles and only loading those relevant to the user’s requirements. For instance, you can first load only the logic required for the user to sign in and then load the logic for the user’s dashboard only after they have successfully signed in.
9. USE Reusable Hooks
The concept of Hooks in React is extremely popular. Hooks allows you to enhance some of React’s additional functionalities, like interacting with your component’s state and running after-effects in relation to certain state changes in your component. We can do all this without writing class components.
We can also make Hooks reusable so we don’t have to retype the logic in every file they’re used. We do this by creating custom Hooks that can be imported anywhere in the app.
The type of custom Hooks we can create in React is limitless and so it’s up to you to decide how to use them. Just remember that if it’s a functionality that has to be repeated across different components, you should definitely make it reusable.
10. TEST YOUR CODE PROPERLY
Testing your code during development itself will help you to write maintable as well as clean code. Some advantages of testing your code during development itself are :
- Testing helps you detect errors and bugs
- Detecting bugs will lead you to an improved code
- Unit tests can be documented for data collection and future reference.
- Early bug detection saves you the cost of paying developers to put out the fire the bug could cause if left unchecked.
- Bug free apps will lead to your organisations’s growth and profit ultimately
10. USE FUNCTIONAL COMPONENTS
If you make use of functional components , you actually end up writing less code, it’s also easier to read . With functional components, you don’t have to worry about using the this or using classes. You can also manage your component’s state easily by writing less code thanks to Hooks.
Most of the updated resources you’d find on React make use of functional components, making it easy to understand and follow helpful guides and resources created by the community when you run into problems
11 . Stay Up to Date With React Version Changes
As time goes, new functionalities will be introduced, and some old ones are modified. The best way to keep track of this is to watch the official documentation.
You can also join React communities on social media like twitter,facebook,linkedin etc to get information about changes when they happen.
Staying up to date with the current version of React will help you determine when to optimize or make changes to your code base for the best performance.
There are also external libraries built around React that you should be up to date with as well — like React Router, which is used for routing in React. Knowing what changes these libraries make can help you make relevant important changes to your app and make things easier for everyone working on the project.
Additionally, some functionalities can become deprecated and certain keywords can be changed when new versions are released. To be on the safe side, you should always read the documentation and guides when such changes are made.
CONCLUSION
So, to conclude our article here, simply just learning how to use React isn’t all that’s required to create outstanding web apps. But instead, there are best practices that you should follow to help you build efficient products.
Following the above React conventions will not only help your app, but it also help in improving your craft and skills as a frontend developer — you learn how to write efficient, scalable and maintainable code, and you stand out as an excellent professional in your field.
