I want to make my first site with a headless cms and I wanted to know if to make a blog it is better to do it with node or with react, I don't know what advantages one and the other can give me, I have been in the world IT for a short time. (Sorry for my english)
Hey Carlos,
Thanks for posting this question, here! I do not have a definitive answer, but I thought I'd offer my perspective. I'm really curious to know what others think, too.
Node.js is great for building a blog. I imagine you might use a stack like Express and EJS to template your posts, which would be pretty fast, and it's easy to do SEO.
React.js is very popular, because of its power and performance. However, it's not necessarily fast by default. The main benefit of React is that it creates a Single Page App, which doesn't have conventional page navigation — it's really fast to navigate from one page to another. It's also really good for building interactivity. However, SEO is a little more complicated, and the first page load can be a little slow because the React framework is so big.
You can address SEO and initial load time in React by using a React framework like Gatsby or Next.js. Personally, I like Next.js a lot — I found it easier to learn than Gatsby. Both have built-in SEO support, and features to optimize the initial page load (like Static Site Generation).
So, as always, my perspective is: it depends.
Node.js is a little "old school," but it still works really well — especially for a basic website like a personal site or a blog. It's pretty fast. It has traditional page loads, but that isn't the end of the world.
React can be complicated to learn, but it's currently one of the most popular development frameworks. Once you know it, it has lots of powerful functionality for developing web apps. On its own, however, it's not necessarily great for SEO.
Next and Gatsby have a steeper learning curve, because you need to learn two frameworks (React + Next or Gatsby). However, they are both really powerful and produce really excellent web apps. They're very fast and great for SEO.
These are just my initial thoughts, and I'm not an expert. I'm really curious what others think! I know there are a lot of other advantages and disadvantages that I'm not thinking of.
And, Carlos, please let us know what you decide and keep us up-to-date on how it goes!
Sam
Edit: I talked to some colleagues, and they suggested that it's worth checking out Vue, as well. A lot of people think it is easier to get started with Vue than with React. You could use Nuxt for SEO with Vue.
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