Speed up your Next.js application with Redis

Next.js, a popular web framework, optimizes web performance by combining server-side rendering (SSR) and static site generation (SSG), which together enhance SEO and data handling, but can suffer in performance if not managed carefully. The blog post discusses improving Next.js API call efficiency using SWR, a data fetching library that employs a stale-while-revalidate strategy, and Redis, a server-side caching tool. SWR quickly delivers cached data while asynchronously updating the UI, and Redis helps manage server load and API usage by caching responses, particularly for high-traffic sites or when consuming APIs with quotas, as demonstrated in a Covid Tracker project. This project uses Javier Aviles’ Covid API to rank countries by Covid cases, leveraging Redis to achieve faster response times and reduce API request overload, with the API data being refreshed every 60 seconds in Redis. The blog also includes code implementation details for both the API and UI, showcasing the practical application of these caching strategies.