Boost Your React App’s Performance: A Step-by-Step Guide

Are you tired of dealing with slow and sluggish React applications? Do you want to learn how to identify and eliminate common performance issues? Look no further! In this article, we’ll take you on a journey to optimize your React app’s performance and make it lightning-fast.

Meet Cardie: Our Sample Project

To make this guide as practical as possible, we’ll work on a simple React application called Cardie. It’s a user profile card that displays information and allows users to change their profession with a button click. You can follow along with the GitHub repo.

The Performance Checklist

1. Identify Wasted Renders

The first step to optimizing your React app’s performance is to identify wasted renders. You can do this by toggling on the “highlight updates” option in the React DevTools. This will show you which components are re-rendered unnecessarily.

2. Extract Frequently Updated Regions into Isolated Components

Once you’ve identified wasted renders, break up your component tree to support regions updated frequently. This will help reduce unnecessary re-renders and improve performance.

3. Use Pure Components When Appropriate

Pure components are a powerful tool for optimizing performance. They only re-render if the props or state change. Use React.PureComponent to implement pure components and reduce unnecessary re-renders.

4. Avoid Passing New Objects as Props

Avoid passing new objects as props to components, as this can cause unnecessary re-renders. Instead, use a single object reference and update its properties as needed.

5. Use the Production Build

When deploying to production, always use the production build. This will yield bundle-optimized files for production.

6. Employ Code Splitting

Code splitting is a technique that allows you to dynamically send chunks of code to users when they need it. This can improve performance by reducing the initial bundle size.

Get Started with LogRocket

Now that you have a checklist for optimizing your React app’s performance, it’s time to get started with LogRocket. Sign up for a free account and get set up with modern React error tracking in minutes.

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