Improving the Performance of Your Applications

The effective performance of a web application is critical to providing a good user experience and improving conversions. The React library implements different techniques to render our components fast and to touch the Document Object Model (DOM) as little as possible. Applying changes to the DOM is usually expensive, so minimizing the number of operations is crucial.

However, there are some scenarios where React cannot optimize the process, and it’s up to the developer to implement specific solutions to make the application run smoothly.

In this chapter, we will go through the basic concepts of React and we will learn how to use some APIs to help the library find the optimal path to update the DOM without degrading the user experience. We will also see some common mistakes that can harm our applications and make them slower.

We should avoid optimizing our components for the sake of it, and it is important to apply...