Handling API Data in Next.js: Things I Learned While Working on Real Projects

Hi everyone, Over the past few years I’ve mostly worked with React and React Native , but more recently I started working more with Next.js for web applications. One area where I learned a lot was handling API data in production applications . In tutorials everything looks simple, but in real projects things become a bit more complicated. I wanted to share a few things that helped me while working on Next.js applications that rely heavily on APIs. 1. Choosing the right data fetching approach One thing that confused me at the beginning was when to fetch data on the server and when to fetch it on the client . Next.js gives several options: Server components Client-side fetching API routes Static generation At first I used client-side fetching for almost everything because it was similar to how I worked with React. But later I realized that some pages worked much better when data was fetched on the server side , especially pages that needed fast loading and good SEO. Now I usually think a