How to Build a SaaS Website with Next.js and Strapi: Step-by-Step Guide
Blog post from Strapi
The guide offers a comprehensive walkthrough for building a production-ready SaaS website using Next.js for the frontend and Strapi as a headless CMS backend, emphasizing the integration of dynamic content types, server-side data fetching, and token-based authentication. It outlines the setup of Strapi with Collection Types and Single Types to manage content like pricing plans and blog posts, and connects these to a responsive Next.js frontend through Strapi's REST API with TypeScript safety. The deployment process involves configuring environment variables and deploying the Strapi backend to Railway with PostgreSQL, while the Next.js frontend is deployed to Vercel. The guide also highlights best practices for project structuring, component styling with Tailwind CSS, implementing JWT authentication using HttpOnly cookie storage, and setting up API permissions to control access. It addresses performance optimization techniques, such as using specific fields from Strapi to reduce API response sizes and prioritizing above-the-fold images for faster loading, and it suggests further improvements like on-demand revalidation with Next.js ISR and multi-layer caching with HTTP cache-control headers.