Why I moved away from Next.js

Next.js has been a wonderful experience for me for several years. I used Next.js for my side projects, mainstream applications and client work. When I learned React I craved more power, something which other frameworks offered. At that time Angular was very popular and was adopted by many big software companies. The main feature which led me to Next.js was the page router, which was a great thing Next.js had to offer.

It was my go-to framework for this long because it was easy to set up and good DX. Also, features like RSC (React Server Components), layouts, streaming, and image optimization with next/image were fascinating and attractive to new React developers. When you start your journey with simple HTML/CSS, Next.js seems like that is something which runs the web. And that is true to some extent in the current 2023 - 2025 era. Most of the web is now migrated to Next.js or new developers are putting their feet directly into Next.js even before React.

Well, speaking of which Create React App (CRA) has been already deprecated by the React team, and guess what's the new way to start a new React project now? - Next.js. No, It's not me who says that. It's the React team itself. If you'll go to React docs it's the first way you can start a new React project.

The wave of Next.js

Next.js is everywhere, from SASS websites to big corporate companies, everyone is using Next.js. Even if we hop onto YouTube there is a vast difference in the quantity of tutorials for Next.js when compared to other frameworks and technologies. How did Next.js gain this much popularity? Is Next.js that feature-rich and performing? Yes—It is feature-rich and performing. The features provided by scratch justify the popularity of the framework, but being popular doesn't mean that it's good.

New developers often don't choose a different tech stack based on the requirement of the project, instead, they use the tech stack they are comfortable with. I mean it often works out because at low traffic almost every framework is good. But when it comes to scalable, performing and secure programs choosing a tech stack on the need of a project is a must.

I have seen people use Next.js for static websites, Yes—we can use it there but it would be more performing if would chose React only or something like Astro for that. It would work well in both, but the second one is more efficient.

Problems

Next.js offers SSR, SSG, ISR, seamless SEO, and a smooth developer experience. But in practicality, things are a little bit different. Vercel, The parent company of Next.js have given us an open source framework but they hid its true potential behind their infrastructures. When self-hosting Next.js we can not use it to its true potential.

Security

A recent vulnerability CVE-2025-29927, caused hackers to bypass Next.js Middleware with just the help of a simple header x-middleware-subrequest. But websites that were hosted on Next.js were not having these issues, Only sites that were self-hosted faced this problem. Many SASS companies had to migrate to Vercel because of this issue.

CVE-2025-29927

Next.js version 15.2.3 has been released to address a security vulnerability CVE-2025-29927.

Next.js uwu logo by SAWARATSUKILee Robinson

Well, the team took a bit too long to fix this issue. This issue was originally reported on Feb 27, 2025, and they released the patch on Mar 23, 2025. For websites that were running on the latest version of Next.js, the patch was released early, but websites with older versions faced issues till the end.

Mindset

This is not the only problem with Next.js. This was just a security vulnerability, Next.js performance issue is another thing, but the changes in its philosophy are controversial. Vercel, who used to promote Jamstack and static site generation jumped to serverless, then they started to promote SSR—the opposite of what they originally started, and with their latest fluid compute they are again moving to microVMs.

Performance

Next.js has not been the best performer around, they claim it's fast, but it is slow at scale. The other issues that I faced are

1. Page Load Performance: A basic page render took between 200-400 milliseconds, and pages with dynamic content sometimes exceeded 700 milliseconds. These slow load times were a bad trait for user engagement and conversion rates.
2. Impact on SEO and Site Stability: Tools like Googlebot and Aherfs, when crawling multiple pages simultaneously, caused the site to crash multiple times per week. This not only worsened the search engine rankings but also made websites unstable.

We can also look at the Core Web Vital Technology Report to determine the difference in Lighthouse score and Page weight of different frameworks and technologies.

Core Web Vitals Technology Report (cwvtech.report)

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Looker Studio

Final Thoughts

Next.js is a great framework for building small applications you can host on Vercel, but it might not be the best choice for marketing websites. It provides a lot of good features that might work in applications where SEO and performance are not a factor. In the end, I don't hate Next.js. It was my go-to framework for all this time, but now its time to move on and learn and try some other frameworks.