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Streaming SSR
React 18 includes architectural improvements to React server-side rendering (SSR) performance. This means you can use Suspense
in your React components in streaming SSR mode and React will render content on the server and send updates through HTTP streams.
React Server Components, an experimental feature, is based on streaming. You can read more about Server Components related streaming APIs in next/streaming
. However, this guide focuses on streaming with React 18.
Using Streaming Server-Rendering
When you use Suspense in a server-rendered page, there is no extra configuration required to use streaming SSR. When deployed, streaming can be utilized through infrastructure like Edge Functions on Vercel (with the Edge Runtime) or with a Node.js server (with the Node.js runtime). AWS Lambda Functions do not currently support streaming responses.
All SSR pages have the ability to render components into streams and the client continues receiving updates from these streams even after the initial SSR response is sent. When any suspended components resolve down the line, they are rendered on the server and streamed to the client. This means applications can start emitting HTML even before all the data is ready, improving your app's loading performance.
As an added bonus, in streaming SSR mode the client will also use selective hydration to prioritize component hydration based on user interactions, further improving performance.
For non-SSR pages, all Suspense boundaries will still be statically optimized. Check out next/streaming
for the API reference for streaming SSR.
Streaming Features
next/dynamic
Next.js supports lazy loading external libraries with import()
and React components with next/dynamic
. Deferred loading helps improve the initial loading performance by decreasing the amount of JavaScript necessary to render the page. Components or libaries are only imported and included in the JavaScript bundle when they're used.
Read more about how to use next/dynamic
.
Important Notes
next/head
and next/script
Using resource tags (e.g. scripts or stylesheets) in next/head
won't work as intended with streaming, as the loading order and timing of next/head
tags can no longer be guaranteed once you add Suspense boundaries. We suggest moving resource tags to next/script
with the afterInteractive
or lazyOnload
strategy, or to _document
. For similar reasons, we also suggest migrating next/script
instances with the beforeInteractive
strategy to _document
.
Data Fetching
Data fetching within Suspense
boundaries is currently only supported on the client side. Server-side data fetching is not supported yet. Read the Layouts RFC for more information about the future of data fetching on the server.
Styling
The following solutions are compatible with Next.js streaming:
- Inline Styles
- Global Stylesheets
- CSS Modules
- styled-jsx
CSS-in-JS solutions like styled-components
and emotion
are currently not compatible with streaming. For library authors, check out the upgrade guide to learn more.