5+ Next.js Project Ideas to Kickstart Your Web Development Journey

Looking for Next.js project ideas to kickstart your web development journey? Here are 5+ ideas that are perfect for beginners and experienced developers alike.

1. URL Shortener Landing Page

Chibuike Nwachuku provides a good example of a URL shortener built using Next.js, Tailwind CSS and Strapi. As a developer, you might have a good idea just how off-putting the sight of a long URL is—who would want to remember dannyandtinaswedding.blogpost.com/rsvp-yes-or-no/confirm? This is where a URL shortener comes in handy, with its advantages of aesthetic appeal, analytics tracking, and link swapping, to name a few.

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In fact, if this project doesn’t speak to you, no problem! You can actually utilize Nextjs route masking to create succinct URLs that are clean and SEO friendly.

2. Blog Website

Through trial-and-error, Caleb Olojo built his own blog using Next.js CMS and MDX. In his own case study, he teaches how you can create a similar blog like his and walks you through the issues he encountered at first. The functions he wrote uses the Node.js’ File System API and calls these functions at the server-side in the pages folder since Next.js has some data-fetching methods that run on the server.

3. Messaging App

In an article for the blog Ably, Jo Franchetti teaches you how you can create a real-time chat application using Next.js. The web app is built upon the Next.js create-next-app template and contains a React component, which in her case uses the site Ably to send and receive messages. When you create next app , you are able to send or publish messages over an Ably channel, and clients that use it will be subscribed to the channel and will receive messages.

4. Pricing Calculator

Here’s a simple project idea to get your feet wet—a single page React app built with Next.js, TypeScript and Theme UI. This pricing/tip calculator shared on GitHub highlights the conveniences of using Next.js which include automatic transpilation and bundling, hot code reloading, server rendering, and static file serving.

5. API Project

Lawrence Eagles, who wrote Build an API with Serverless Functions in Next.js shows the advantage of rendering React components into HTML pages at build time, made possible using Next.js. “Whether you are using SSR (server-side rendering) or SSG (static site generation) in Next.js,” Eagles says, “your React components are already rendered into HTML pages by the time they reach the browser.”

6. User Authentication System

Sheliak is an open-source authentication service and was built using Django, React, and GraphQL. Did you know that you could also build a single-sign-on authentication system using Next.js? Introducing the NextAuth.js library, explained extensively by Kingsley Ubah in Implementing user authorization in Next.js.

Conclusion

These six examples should get you to appreciate the benefits of building a web application using a Next.js project structure. You may not get noticed by recruiters right away, but at least you’re able to develop Next.js skills—a toolkit best acquired through doing. A helpful tip when attempting these projects—follow the steps carefully, and try to compare with other examples you can find online. When you’re trying to get hired as a developer, it’s good to keep in mind that there are many ways to build something just as there are many ways to build a web application aside from using the Next.js framework.

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