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Choosing the right web application development platform to build stable and fast web solutions is a complex task for business owners and developers. They need to keep in mind multiple project requirements, matching them with dozens of web development frameworks and their numerous features.
But is there a one-size-fits-all web development framework that can serve every project? Probably, there isn't. However, you can try to find one of the most powerful and performant options. According to StackOverflow 2024 developer survey, React has the support of 41.6% of professional web developers. It means that React js has the most impressive feature set and high performance in versatile areas.
Here we invite you to find out:
- What exact technologies are behind React js;
- What you can develop, using the library;
- 7 traits of React solutions that make it the best front-end development framework for building web pages and apps of different types.
Therefore, if you have a question "Why should I use React?", this article is for you.
What is React?
In a nutshell, React is an open-source JavaScript UI library for building scalable, fast, and easily maintainable web apps' frontends.
Some developers prefer calling React js a web development framework. But it works only with UIs and other front-end elements, so technically, it is a library. React has a declarative coding type and shines in flexibility, usability, and, certainly, UI rendering.
Facebook (now Meta) released the library in 2013, at the time, when Angular was the supreme framework in the web development sphere. React brought balance into the domain, and now has become the most popular web development library among professional web developers.
React js is the Grail of constantly evolving front-end development. For now, more than 46.4% of the world's top 1000 websites rely on this JavaScript library. Such companies as Netflix, Apple, Tesla, Airbnb, IMDb, and PayPal create their software projects with React.
Where is It Used?
React is a highly flexible JavaScript library that supports the development of a wide range of digital products: from dynamic websites and enterprise-grade web applications to hybrid mobile apps and browser plugins. Its component-based architecture, efficient rendering, reusable ui components, and strong ecosystem make it a go-to choice across industries and platforms.
React applications often follow a Flux-based software architecture. It helps manage app data flow and state in large applications by enforcing a unidirectional data stream. This is an efficient approach to handling dynamic user interactions.
Despite the fact that it is commonly known as a frontend framework, it can also be chosen for building desktop apps. Usually, it can be applied to such projects with the help of specialized tools like Electron.
Progressive Web Applications (PWAs)
React js is ideal for building web apps that offer native-like performance and offline functionality. By leveraging service workers and cached resources, React enables PWAs to load quickly and operate seamlessly, even with poor or no internet connection. This makes it an excellent choice for user-focused services like various web pages, news sites, social platforms, and utility apps.
Banking and FinTech Apps
Building web apps for banking and finance isn’t just about making them look good – it’s about keeping them secure and running smoothly. React helps by letting developers break the app into smaller pieces (components) and handle data in a safer, more controlled way. That makes it a great fit for building secure, user-friendly apps that deal with things like logging in and managing sensitive financial data.
E-commerce Apps
React handles a lot of users and dynamic content really well, which makes it a great choice for e-commerce apps. It enables fast page loads, smoothly functioning interactive elements, personalized seamless user experiences, and responsive interfaces. All this is critical for building user interfaces for modern shopping platforms.
Single Page Applications (SPAs)
React is one of the most common tools for building modern web apps. It’s often used for single-page applications (SPAs), where the page doesn’t reload every time you click something – instead, the content updates instantly, which makes the experience faster and smoother. Developers rely on it for things like dashboards, CRM systems, and SaaS platforms because it handles complex, data-heavy tasks really well. But it’s just as good for building simple, fast websites, too.
Hybrid Mobile Apps
React also powers hybrid mobile applications. These are web apps packaged to function like native apps on mobile devices. Tools like React Native (a framework derived from React) allow developers to build truly native mobile applications for iOS and Android using the same syntax and standard React components. The use of the React Native framework significantly reduces software web development time and cost while maintaining native performance. If you want to learn more about this technology, you can follow this link to read our article about it.
Enterprise Dashboards and Data-Driven Apps
React excels in building enterprise dashboards, admin panels, and data visualization tools. It is possible thanks to its vast ecosystem of UI libraries and easy integration with charting and analytics tools like Recharts and Chart.js. Businesses can rely on React to create even complex user interfaces that manage large datasets and enable real-time interaction.
Content Management Systems and Blogging Platforms
React can be integrated with headless CMSs. This provides software development teams with full control over the frontend design of web pages while pulling dynamic content from a backend API. This is ideal for creating interactive user interfaces for blogs, news portals, or marketing websites that require both performance and customizability.
Why Choose React for Web Development: 7 Key Reasons
If you want to better understand whether you use React for building your banking web app, enterprise dashboard, blogging platform, or any other web pages, consider the following facts.
Creation of Rich and Performant User Interfaces
The virtual DOM and JavaScript basis of React give the library the power to render user interfaces seamlessly, even during heavy user traffic loads.
Virtual DOM (VDOM) makes React applications' UI components lightweight and speeds up maintenance and user interface rendering. Virtual DOM is the “ideal” counterpart of the real DOM. Every new view element gets added to the VDOM first, which matches it with the real Document Object Model. As a result, Virtual DOM applies only the recent changes instead of loading the whole UI build. The React community called that process Reconciliation.
Apart from UI performance, the virtual DOM enables React declarative API to operate faster, optimizing the overall application performance.
Fast Scalability and Maintenance
React’s modular, component-based structure makes it easy to build web apps that are both scalable and simple to maintain. Developers can break the UI into smaller, reusable parts – so there’s less repeated code and updates are much easier down the line. With React’s “build once, use anywhere” approach, teams can reuse the same components across different pages – or even across entirely different projects. That means faster development and a consistent look and feel throughout the app.
React is also built to grow with you. As your app grows – whether you're adding new features or getting more users – React lets you scale things gradually. You don’t have to tear everything down and rebuild from scratch.
It’s also easier to test and debug. Since each component handles its own logic, you can quickly track down issues without affecting the rest of the app. And with handy tools for inspecting and testing code in real time, fixing bugs becomes a lot less painful.
Ease of Use and Learning
This JavaScript library is known for being easy to pick up. It has clear documentation, plenty of training materials, and countless tutorials, so even beginners in front-end development can get started without feeling lost.
For developers who are already familiar with JavaScript, learning React js can take just a day or two, allowing them to quickly become productive and start building real-world applications almost immediately.
React’s intuitive syntax, based on JavaScript and JSX (JavaScript XML), makes the development process smoother and more enjoyable. With JSX, developers can write HTML-like code right inside JavaScript, which makes building user interfaces feel a lot more intuitive and the code easier to read.
React also keeps things simple when it comes to setup. You can get a project up and running quickly, and there are tools that handle most of the environment configuration for you, saving time and cutting out a lot of the usual headaches.
One of the biggest reasons developers like React is its focus on reusable components. It’s like building with Lego pieces – you create small parts you can use throughout the app instead of starting from scratch each time. This makes development faster, keeps things consistent, and makes it easier to add new features later. Plus, there’s a huge selection of tools and libraries built for React, which makes working with it even smoother.
Broad Customization Capabilities for Your Next Web Development Project
You can use JS code to create custom plugins and 3d party integrations for your React web project. It becomes possible with the React syntax extension called JSX. Custom-written JSX components support HTML quotes, translating their mockups into ReactElement trees.
Simply put, JSX enables you to add HTML patterns to your JavaScript code. In addition to the custom components and unique functionalities, JSX helps you to increase your application security and facilitate the coding process. You can get along without JSX when creating your React application.
Efficient Tools for Development
React has some great tools that really make a developer’s job easier. They help you work faster, spot bugs more easily, and keep your UI design process nice and smooth. One of the handiest tools is React Developer Tools – a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that gives you a closer look at how your app works behind the scenes. It gives you a behind-the-scenes look at your app – letting you explore the component tree in real time, check props, state, and hooks, and even tweak them on the fly. That means you can quickly figure out what’s going wrong and fix UI issues without digging through a ton of code.
It also helps you make sense of how your components are connected. You can see which ones are inside others, so it’s easier to follow the data flow and understand how different parts of your app are working together.
Redux DevTools
React doesn’t just come with great tools of its own – it also works smoothly with libraries like Redux, which a lot of developers rely on to handle state. And if you’re using Redux, the DevTools extension is super handy. It gives you a bunch of features that make tracking and managing your app’s state way easier, like:
- State and action logging for transparent state management;
- Time-travel debugging, which allows you to step backward and forward through application states to pinpoint issues;
- Hot reloading support, which will enable you to tweak code without losing state;
- Performance monitoring (this helps identify bottlenecks caused by unnecessary renders).
Together, React and Redux developer tools make application development more efficient, maintainable, and transparent, especially beneficial for large-scale, data-driven web apps.
Exceptional SEO Performance
React enables developers to build high-performing, scalable web applications that are also SEO-friendly. It means that by using React for web development, you can overcome a lot of challenges that are typical in cases of working with many other frameworks.
A major factor behind React’s strong SEO potential is its reliance on JavaScript. JavaScript is used to pose indexing challenges for search engines. Meanwhile, advances in rendering technology combined with server-side rendering (SSR) and static site generation (SSG) tools like Next.js have made React-based websites far more search engine–friendly.
Key reasons to use React if you want to achieve exceptional SEO performance
Server-Side Rendering (SSR)
React lets you render pages on the server before they reach the browser. That means search engines can see fully loaded content right away – without needing to run JavaScript – making it easier to get your pages indexed.
Fast Loading Times
Thanks to React’s virtual DOM and smart rendering, sites built with React tend to load quickly. That’s important, since Google takes site speed seriously when ranking pages.
Mobile Optimization
React apps are built to be responsive from the start, which fits perfectly with Google’s mobile-first indexing approach.
Structured Content Delivery
When used properly, React delivers clean, semantic HTML. That helps search engines better understand your content.
Easy Integration with SEO Tools
You can easily add SEO essentials – like metadata, canonical tags, and sitemaps – especially when using frameworks like Next.js or Gatsby.
Component-Based Approach
React’s modular structure lets you build reusable components that keep your UI consistent. This kind of clean, organized structure can also improve how search engines interpret your site.
Large Developer Community
And, finally, React is backed by a strong developer community with Meta behind it. For React users, it means that they can always find support and get valuable advice if they have difficulties during their app development.
At the same time, those who plan to use React as a platform for their web application but want to hire a team of developers will benefit from the large community too. First of all, the larger the community, the faster and easier you can find an experienced developer with deep expertise or even a team of such specialists. Furthermore, the in-house JS developer teams can learn how to work with React more easily with the community's assistance.
To Wrap Up: Will You Choose React?
That's it! Now you know the 7 most important reasons to build interfaces for your web application with React and what types of apps you can create with it. As you can see, React applications suit projects where performance, development speed, ease of use, and higher search rankings are the priority. Besides that, the React framework users can get the support of the React community and apply developer tools to avoid bugs, create unique features, or hire an experienced specialist.
All that variety of advanced features makes the idea of using React a pretty good choice to create a powerful web application.
P.S. If you are looking for a partner that will help you create a fully functioning React application for your business, contact us. We have 10+ years of web development experience with React and offer different work engagement scenarios (individual React developers or teams).
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