Top NextJS Projects to Become a Better Developer

In today’s competitive job market, you need exceptional skills to stand out from other job seekers. Simply understanding theoretical concepts will not going to help you land your dream job. You need to master the technology or domain you are interested in through rigorous practice. The best way to practice and improve skills is by building projects. This gives you much-needed hands-on experience in real-world projects.

If you are looking for NextJS project ideas to become a better developer, we are going to help you through this article. We will provide a list of NextJS projects from which you can choose and start practicing to level up your understanding of NextJS.

NextJS is an open-source framework based on React. It was developed by a private firm named Vercel for building full-stack web applications. It provides all the necessary features and optimizations that a modern web application needs.

React is a JavaScript library that provides various components to create user interfaces.

Before start building projects or learning NextJS, you need a strong foundation in the following technologies:

• HTML: It is an abbreviation for Hypertext Markup Language and is used for structuring a web page.
• CSS: To add styles to a web application, we use CSS.
• JavaScript: It is used to bring interactivity to your web applications.
• React: Next.js is built on top of React. So, you will need to be familiar with its concepts like state management, component lifecycle and so on.
• TypeScript: Having knowledge of TypeScript will be a plus point.

A well-designed website should have clear structure, responsive design, and optimized content. Moreover, it must be SEO (search engine optimization) friendly. NextJS provides the following features that help you in building a well-designed web application:

• SEO Friendly: NextJS supports server-side rendering (SSR) which allows a web page to be generated and rendered on the server side. As a result, search engine bots can easily crawl and index the web page immediately.
• Developers Community: You will be part of a large developer community that actively engages and contributes to adding features and improving performance.
• Styling: It allows you to use any styling methods including CSS and Tailwind CSS.
• Routing: The navigation between different parts of a web page is termed routing. NextJS provides a well-defined file system based router that supports layouts and nested routing.
• Built-in Optimizations: Last but not the least NextJS also has a built-in optimization support for image, fonts and scripts. It helps in improving user-experience.

To be a better developer, you need to improve your skills and understanding of NextJS by working on projects. Here is a list of some top projects in NextJS:

1. Personal Blog Application

If you are a beginner, start with creating a personal blogging platform to get familiar with NextJS. The blogging platform is a website that is used to publish and manage written content on the Internet. It will not only clear your fundamentals of NextJS but it will also significantly impact your resume.

• Time Taken: 1 week
• Key Features: In this project, provide the features like creating, viewing, updating and deleting blog posts. At the user end, you can give some additional functionalities to get feedbacks such as like, share and comment.
• Learning outcome: This project will help you to understand the basics of file-based routing, dynamic routes, and rendering with NextJS.

2. To Do Application

To-Do List is a simple web application that allows users to manage a list of tasks they need to complete on daily, weekly or monthly basis. Adding this project to your resume showcases that you have a clear understanding of NextJS fundamentals.

• Time Taken: 1-2 days
• Key Features: It is a mini project with basic features such as creating, viewing, updating, and deleting tasks. Users can also mark tasks as complete after finishing them.
• Learning outcome: Understanding of JavaScript Map and React useState.

3. Document Management System

A document management system project is designed to help people use, organize, and store various types of documents. The format of the documents could be PDFs, images, videos, audios, spreadsheets and so on. You must have this project added to your portfolio as companies often require candidates with the knowledge of file handling.

• Time Taken: 1-2 days
• Key Features: Add functionality to view, delete and search documents. The list of documents should contain the name and description.
• Learning outcome: Completing this project will help you learn about file handling, NPM, Next.js routing, and React Hooks concepts.

4. Quiz App

Quiz app is a web application where users are provided with a set of multiple choice questions. This type of project are often used by educational institution to conduct examinations.

• Time Taken: 1-2 days
• Key Features: Score analysis, forward and backward navigation between questions, users should be able to choose correct answer from the given options.
• Learning outcome: After completion of the project, you will get familiar with Bootstrap, NPM, NodeJS, React JS hooks, etc.

5. E-Commerce App

To step up your understanding of NextJS, build an e-commerce platform which will be slightly more complex than the previously discussed projects. An e-commerce website is an online store where users can buy and sell products.

• Time Taken: 1-2 weeks
• Key Features: This project requires the features like product listings, shopping carts, payment gateway, product search, wishlist and product review.
• Learning outcome: Through this project, you will learn state management, data fetching, and API routes in NextJS.

6. Car Rental System

A car rental system is a platform where people can book a vehicle for short-term usage. You can use this project to show recruiters that you are capable of handling data and third-party services.

• Time Taken: 1-2 weeks
• Key Features: The features you can implement in this project are user registration, car listing, booking system, payment gateway, search and filter.
• Learning outcome: You will understand how to implement user authentication and authorization, as well as integrate third party services into a web application.

7. URL Shortner Project

A URL shortener service is a simple yet effective project to understand NextJS’s serverless functions and API routes. It will accept a long URL and generate a shorter version of it.

• Time Taken: 1 week
• Key Features: It only offers one feature, which is to generate a short URL from a specified long URL.
• Learning outcome: This project will teach you how to handle redirects and use attributes like target and rel.

8. Real-time Chatting Platform

A chatting platform is a software application that allows instant communication between two or more users. This project will demonstrate the real-time capabilities of NextJS using WebSockets or server-sent events.

• Time Taken: 1-2 weeks
• Key Features: This type of project should include features such as group chat, media sharing, individual voice calls, and notifications.
• Learning outcome: This project can help you learn about managing real-time data, user sessions, and integrating services like react toastify that provide notification functionality.

9. Social Networking Platform

Building a social networking platform, even on a smaller scale, can be a plus point for your resume. This platform will allow users to create and share posts in different forms including images, videos, blogs, etc.

• Time Taken: 2-3 weeks
• Key Features: The features of this project are as follows: user authentication, managing their profiles, post interaction and privacy settings.
• Learning outcome: Building this project will give you deep understanding of user interactions, data modeling, and real-time data updates. It will also teach you how to optimize performance of NextJS applications.

10. App Clone

Creating an app clone of any popular application such as Netflix, Spotify or Amazon, will help you in learning and understanding the underlying technologies and architecture of them. Doing a complex project like an app clone shows your problem-solving and analytical skills.

• Time Taken: 2-3 weeks
• Key Features: This project needs several key features including user authentication, product listings, search functionality, payment processing, media streaming, and many more.
• Learning outcome: This project introduces you to the use of third-party APIs and the NextJS Image component for optimized image delivery. Remember, when cloning the app, it is necessary to understand the underlying concepts and technologies used.