Whether you’ve heard about ReactJS by word of mouth or from trending articles online, the hype certainly meets the expectations of the user. Created and open-sourced from 2015, the library is used primarily for building user interfaces and was ranked with the highest demand by Stackoverflow in 2017. First developed by Facebook, React then spanned out to some of the most popular SaaS apps that you use on a daily basis such as Netflix, Yahoo! Mail, Instagram, Airbnb, and many more. If you’re not convinced, today we will go in depth on 4 specific reasons why you should use ReactJS when developing your next SaaS app.

Code Reusability

ReactJS dominantly relies on the creation of components on single-page applications which are able to independently function. The structure is much like building blocks, where you have small chunks each responsible for a certain feature and you can re-arrange the blocks to build a more complex system. These components in their turn can be re-used in future projects, allowing you to have a base to build on instead of starting from scratch each time. This approach divides complex web development into compartmentalized tasks which you can focus on one by one.

Though the case is not as simple as copy and paste, it saves time and hassle for the development team when working on the task at hand. Each component follows its independent logic and are responsible for separate sets of actions. This also doesn’t result in any “domino effects” when codes affect each other in different sections, resulting in do-overs. This element gives the library its notability in being easily adaptable for beginners. The less excess code is used for the project, the higher the maintainability is for the developers working on it.

SEO Friendly

Besides being neat and functional for the user as well as easily-adaptable for the developer, all SaaS apps require Search Engine Optimization. Google Rankings and user experiences are still a must in order to keep yourself ahead of the competition and satisfying for the audience. A great chunk of a successfully optimized app relies on speed performance rates. Slower sites undoubtedly lose users within seconds, and the new age of web development brought more efficient solutions for this. Before reaching the actual content of a website, the coding must be SEO-friendly in order to be easily captured by search engines.

Using ReactJS for app development to create single page applications promises quicker performance rates based on less retrieving of data. The site and its separate components are functioning without doing a round trip to fetch more HTML data which allows instant responses even between new tabs. Instead of completely retrieving new data to load a full page, the HTML data initiated by the user changes in response to user relevancy. When using apps offline, you may have noticed that, when you scroll through certain elements, new data appears. In reality, it’s already loaded and can be visible to a certain degree without refreshing the page.

Once all the mechanics are in place, you can move on to implementing other SEO features such as titles, meta tags, headers, and so on. The more responsive your app is on both ends, the more likely you are to succeed from a business perspective.

Faster Rendering

The above-mentioned couldn’t be possible without a concept called the Virtual DOM (Document Object Model), an updated version of the originally known DOM. The approach in React also supports better performance, maintainability, and SEO. This concept is able to logically track which components require re-rendering according to user interaction. Whenever you check mark an email to delete it, for example, there isn’t server interference between each time you carry out the function. Instead, the selected emails are then deleted in a single batch. Other aspects of the interface which remained unchanged are no longer re-rendered and don’t result in exceeded loading periods. This is exceptionally valuable for SaaS apps built with ReactJS since easy navigation and carrying out multiple functions are a must for increased user experience.

Returning to the concept of components, this plays a factor for speed as well, since only targeted components will require re-rendering on the client side. First, the difference between the original and new Virtual DOM is calculated, then the actual DOM is updated with the new information. This ensures a quicker and, most importantly, more efficient system of implementation that positively affects the functionality of the app.

From Web to Mobile App with Half the Struggle

In the age of smartphones, where people are constantly on the go, it’s no surprise that mobile usage is a front-runner for most of online traffic. If you have a website up and running, a mobile app is like the salt to the pepper, they just go hand in hand to meet everyone’s needs. Before you worry about the costs and skills required to produce a functional app, ReactJS already has that one covered. React Native is the next best thing after JS which allows an effortless transfer from single-page application (SPA) to a mobile app.

How is this possible exactly? This is primarily due to the similarities of usage among both frameworks. A lighter version of the Virtual DOM is present in React Native to supply the app with just as much speed and performance as an SPA. Both also rely on the same syntax called JSX which is a combination of JavaScript and HTML, making it easily adaptable for developers. Since the foundations of both are similar, you can implement JS components which are mobile-optimized in the Native version and continue building on this. Now the same knowledge and skill-set can be used to reach two different outcomes. This is why more developers favor ReactJS for mobile app development agency over competitor frameworks such as Angular and Vue, which require knowledge of more complex syntax. The average salary for ReactJS developers is more budget-friendly than developers specialized in other programming languages.

The choice of what you use ultimately comes down to personal preference and expertise, even though an insight to newer practices is always a step towards an innovated world of technology. Overall, ReactJS is still considered a lightweight and simplistic library tailored to meet the needs of modern web development.