Most websites today struggle with slow page load times and clunky user experiences. Readers will likely agree that front-end performance is critical for engaging site visitors.
ShipFast offers proven techniques to boost front-end speed and interactivity using NextJS. By following the guide, you can make meaningful strides in site productivity.
We will explore ShipFast's starter kits, customizations, and community wisdom for taking your NextJS projects to the next level. Expect actionable tips for faster development workflows, collaboration, and launching at scale.
Introducing ShipFast: A NextJS Starter Kit
ShipFast is a curated directory of NextJS starters and boilerplates designed to boost productivity for front-end developers. By providing quality-vetted boilerplate code to build upon, ShipFast aims to accelerate development workflow.
The Challenges of Bootstrapping NextJS Projects
When starting a new NextJS project, developers face many decisions around architecture, tooling, and infrastructure that can slow momentum. Configuring environments, installing dependencies, implementing best practices - these tasks demand both time and context to get right. ShipFast simplifies starter code selection so developers can focus efforts on building great applications.
How ShipFast Streamlines NextJS Setup
The ShipFast directory offers a frequently updated catalog of NextJS starters spanning categories like TypeScript, Server-Side Rendering (SSR), Static Site Generation (SSG), ESLint, and more. Developers can browse starters by features to best fit their project needs. Integrating a solid foundation from ShipFast into new apps Jumpstarts development and sets best practices from day one.
Integrating Starters Seamlessly Into Your Workflow
Once you've identified an ideal ShipFast starter for your NextJS application, best practices for integration optimize productivity gains. Carefully consider dependency versions, environment configurations, and architectural conventions to ensure compatibility with your broader toolchain. With some upfront planning, ShipFast starters slot seamlessly into new and existing workflows.
Customizing and Extending Starter Templates
The true utility of ShipFast comes from customization - adapting and extending starters to suit your application's specific requirements. Treat directory offerings as flexible templates meant for modification. Tweak configurations, swap out libraries, implement custom components and more to realize the full benefits of a tailored foundation.
Contributing Your Own Starters to the Community
ShipFast thrives through community contribution. As developers use starters in real-world applications, they can donate production-hardened boilerplates back to the platform. By sharing starters refined through hands-on usage, the NextJS community amplifies ShipFast's catalog of trusted templates. The directory empowers developers to stand on the shoulders of peers by surfacing the most battle-tested starters across the ecosystem.
ShipFast Core Features for Developer Productivity
ShipFast focuses on a curated set of starters optimized for productivity. Here are some key features that set ShipFast apart:
Daily-Updated Starters
The starter directory is updated daily to bring you the latest and greatest NextJS boilerplates. This ensures you always have access to the most recent releases, dependencies, and NextJS version updates.
By tracking daily changes, we save you time researching options. You can rely on ShipFast to serve vetted, up-to-date starters so you can start coding faster.
Optimized Performance
All starters listed on ShipFast meet baseline performance checks for:
- Fast load times
- Optimized bundles
- Lightweight dependencies
- Tree shaking
- Lazy loading
We run performance testing on all starters using Lighthouse, WebPageTest, and custom benchmarks. Only those meeting thresholds for fast initial loads, quick Time to Interactive, and high efficiency scores get listed.
This rigor means any ShipFast starter you select will give you a performance head start. Your sites stand the best chance of scoring 90+ on Google PageSpeed tests and pleasing even impatient users.
SEO-Ready Templates
Many starters on ShipFast come pre-configured with best practices for SEO success, including:
- Responsive images
- Metadata tags
- Server-side rendering
- XML sitemap generators
- Robots.txt optimizer
- Search-friendly CMS (like Sanity or Contentful)
- Lazy loading of JS bundles
Eliminating extra dev time configuring SEO fundamentals means you can focus on creating share-worthy content faster.
Accessible Components
Leading starters listed on ShipFast promote web accessibility with:
- ARIA landmark roles
- Descriptive aria labels
- Keyboard friendly interactions
- Color contrast testing
- Screen reader testing
Accessibility aids like these align with WCAG 2.1 AA standards and help more users access your sites.
Building inclusion by design means reaching wider audiences. Many starters on ShipFast give you the head start you need.
Mobile and PWA Ready
Every ShipFast starter offers:
- Instant progressive previews
- Responsive design testing
- Offline functionality
- Add to Home screen
- Push notifications
- Splash screens
You’ll be able to preview sites instantly on any device. Plus many starters also include progressive web app features like service workers for offline use.
Going mobile helps you deliver app-like experiences everywhere. ShipFast starters equip you with the mobile and PWA capabilities needed to engage users on all devices.
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Developer Spotlight: Project Stories and Tips
Hear first-hand experiences from fellow developers building sites powered by ShipFast. Learn how they boosted productivity and gained creative inspiration.
From Prototype to Production in Days
By leveraging a ShipFast starter template, the Jambo Books team was able to go from idea to deployed ecommerce site in just days. Instead of weeks spent configuring databases, authentication, styling and more, they instantly had those foundations in place and could focus entirely on their unique value proposition - curating niche books from around the world for an enthusiastic readership.
Empowered by the pre-built structure, the developers creatively customized the UI, integrated exotic payment methods, and tailored SEO metadata - all while meeting an accelerated deadline. The result was an immersive browsing experience their customers loved, shipped on time for the holiday shopping season.
Jambo Books credits their ShipFast starter kit for compressing their timeline while still supporting customization. The team advises others not to reinvent boilerplate functionality and instead build on the shoulders of starter giants like ShipFast.
Collaboration Unleashed
An open source ShipFast starter removed friction for a distributed team collaborating on an ambitious project. Located across multiple timezones, effective coordination was essential to hit their launch window.
Leveraging the starter's built-in scaffolding and conventions enabled easier hand-offs between developers. Component ownership was clearly defined, state management simplified, TypeScript types assisted documentation - all helping smooth teamwork. No one needed to constantly sync on low-level config decisions unrelated to core product value.
Despite not physically being in the same room, the team felt a cohesion of vision and velocity typically only found in tight-knit groups. Near daily deploys kept spirits high and surfaced integration issues early. On launch day, each member proudly saw their contributions deliver real customer value.
The team credits ShipFast for erasing setup tax and providing unified patterns so they could focus on creativity not configuration. They recommend other distributed teams use ShipFast to align and ship.
Creative Freedom With Solid Foundations
The founders of Niche Media knew that curating content for enthusiasts required a platform unconstrained by assumptions yet grounded in best practices. Building atop a TypeScript-powered NextJS starter from ShipFast gave them velocity without compromising customization.
The starter kit handled routing, state management, responsive UI, SEO optimization, and testing out the box. On top of that robust base, anything was possible. Soon tailored content models, personalized recommendations, custom analytics and more took shape.
Throughout months of intense product development, having confidence in ShipFast's battle-tested foundations saved considerable mental overhead. The team could freely try bold ideas without second-guessing low-level details unrelated to their core domain. Both product designers and engineers found inspiration in ShipFast's flexible architecture.
In the end, the Niche Media platform launched to rave user reviews, having taken a novel shape while leaning on strong conventions. The team wholeheartedly recommends complementing imagination with the acceleration of ShipFast.
Start Small, Scale Big
When first conceiving Food52 back in 2009, the founding engineers knew that reinventing boilerplate code was an antipattern. Though starting small, their ambition was to someday serve millions of enthusiastic home cooks. Rather than rack up needless technical debt, they chose to build atop robust foundations from ShipFast.
The Food52 platform leveraged ShipFast starters for authentication, database integrations, performance optimizations, and component libraries out the gate. That allowed the fledgling startup to stay lean and focus engineering efforts exclusively on differentiated user experiences like social recipe sharing and virtual cooking classes.
Over a decade later, Food52 has become a leading brand in food media, serving a global audience. Along the journey, the team seamlessly scaled up the initial ShipFast foundations to handle huge traffic spikes and new product verticals.
The founders still proclaim the decision to use ShipFast instead of building from scratch as instrumental to their success. It gave velocity on day one and flexibility ever since to meet customers' evolving needs.
From Side Project to Unicorn Startup
A developer's hobby project designing 3D printable tabletop gaming accessories gained an unexpected following shortly after launch. Building atop a ShipFast starter let him rapidly iterate to meet demand, soon reaching millions in revenue. What began as a passion pursuit after work took on a life of its own, forcing him to make a choice - return to his day job or fully dedicate himself to this accidental opportunity.
Confident in his startup's technological foundations provided by ShipFast, he took the leap into entrepreneurship. The ecosystem of open source libraries, turnkey integrations, automated workflows, and production-ready UI accelerated his throughput as a solo founder. He focused efforts on his unique value - innovating gaming products beloved by a growing community.
Just 3 years since launch, his startup is now a leader in additive manufacturing for hobbyists, on track to become a tech unicorn. He credits ShipFast for providing the leverage in those critical early days to compete with much larger incumbents. The company still relies on ShipFast starter kits to maintain velocity as they scale up.
His advice to other developers - don't underestimate what's possible if your project takes off. Build on reliable foundations like ShipFast so you can confidently ride any wave that comes.
Top NextJS Starters for Common Use Cases
Browse some of most popular, downloaded, and highly-rated starters on ShipFast filtered by target applications. These curated selections provide an excellent starting point to build a variety of sites and web apps faster.
Ecommerce Storefronts
Launching an online store can be overwhelming. You need to handle cart flows, payments, inventory management, order fulfillment, and more right from the start.
The good news is ShipFast offers several ecommerce starters featuring built-in functionality to get your virtual shelves stocked and sales coming in quickly. For example:
- NextJS Commerce by Vercel includes Stripe integration, cart + checkout flows, admin dashboards, and SEO optimizations out of the box.
- NextJS Ecommerce by UI Faces bundles together multiple ecommerce modules like cart features, multi-language support, filters, and more into one starter.
- Shopify's Hydrogen framework connects your Storefront API to frontend React components accelerated by NextJS.
With these starters handling the heavy lifting on key ecommerce functionality, you can shift focus to branding, customizing styles, adding products, and driving traffic. The time and effort savings are immense.
Blogs and Content Sites
Building a content-focused site like an editorial publication or community forum from scratch is demanding. You need to architect complex features like discussion threads, user profiles, multi-author workflows, subscriptions, search, and more before even starting on design or content.
The blog and content starters in ShipFast eliminate these hurdles by packing in relevant functionality upfront:
- Ghost's starter connects the popular headless CMS to NextJS for improved DX and Jamstack architecture.
- GraphCMS's offering pulls content from their hosted GraphQL backend to accelerate builds.
- Sanity's starter studio generates customizable schemas to manage content with React components.
With content infrastructure and multi-author workflows handled, you can invest more time producing great content while the starters handle rendering and optimization.
Interactive Portfolios
For creative professionals like photographers, graphic designers, and architects, the online portfolio is a vital sales tool to showcase work. But building a custom interactive portfolio from scratch is challenging with limited time.
The portfolio starters in ShipFast help creatives get online faster with relevant functionality baked in like:
- Photosnap templates beautiful grid galleries, lightboxes, and slideshows to highlight photography.
- Rocketlaunch offers scroll-triggered animations and 3D model views for interactive project walkthroughs.
- Framer's starter integrates their powerful motion graphics engine for unique page transitions and object animations.
These solutions mean less time worrying about technical complexities, and more ability to focus on the visual design and content that wins clients.
Web Apps and SaaS
For startups and businesses, shipping an MVP fast can mean the difference between leading the pack and losing to competitors. Yet building secure web apps with data dashboards, notifications, collaborators, API integrations and more involves immense complexity.
The SaaS and web app starters in ShipFast consolidate these demands into configurable building blocks:
- Budibase creates backend CRUD APIs, DBs, and admin panels configurable via no-code tools.
- Twind offers customizable UI components like notifications, widgets, and tables connected to Supabase or Airtable.
- Metronome bundles authentications, real-time data binding, permissions and roles management into a secure app shell.
With foundation tech stack complexities solved by the starters, engineers can redirect focus to crafting the proprietary business logic and UX that delivers the core value proposition.
Landing Pages
Lightweight landing pages are essential for launching marketing campaigns, driving event registrations, capturing leads, and prompting viral sharing. But coding these assets from scratch demands significant dev time that could be better spent elsewhere.
The landing page starters in ShipFast help compress lead capture workflow with their out-of-the-box integrations:
- Landkit offers gorgeous templates, Mailchimp integration, analytics and lead gen widgets tuned for conversion.
- Launchpad builds customizable landing experiences using Bootstrap's styling framework and components library.
- Ghost's offering structures landing pages paired with their headless content engine for reduced dev overhead.
With these solutions handling the technical plumbing, marketers can reinvest more energy into crafting targeted ad campaigns and compelling copy.
Join the ShipFast Community
The true power of ShipFast comes from the community behind it. Get involved to help shape the future of NextJS productivity.
GitHub Discussions
Join conversations about NextJS best practices, ask questions, or help other community members in our forums. The ShipFast GitHub discussions page is an excellent place to:
- Get help troubleshooting issues with a starter
- Request new starter ideas to be added
- Share tips and tricks for optimizing NextJS builds
- Discuss emerging best practices as frameworks evolve
Engaging in these developer conversations accelerates your mastery of NextJS while shaping the future of ShipFast.
Contribute Starters and Fixes
Improve ShipFast by contributing new starters or patches that help thousands of developers daily. Our open source model thrives on community contributions like:
- Adding a starter template tailored to your industry
- Publishing a pull request to improve existing code
- Fixing bugs reported in the forums
Leverage your real-world experiences to help the NextJS community ship projects faster. See the contributing guidelines for more details.
Upvote Your Favorite Starters
Help surface hidden gems in the directory by upvoting quality starters tested in your own projects. Simply browse the directory, select a starter you've used successfully, and click the thumbs up icon to upvote. This helps bubble up the most reliable and productivity-boosting starters to the top.
Share Feedback Ideas
What other features or improvements would you like to see? Share suggestions to help guide future ShipFast development.
We highly value community insights for enhancing ShipFast. A few ways to share your ideas:
- Create a discussion thread outlining a specific feature request or product enhancement
- Fill out the annual ShipFast user survey detailing what's working well and what can improve
- Submit generalized feedback via the "Contact Us" page
By contributing your perspectives, you directly influence the roadmap for the ShipFast platform.
Spread the Word
Help more developers discover the power of ShipFast starters by sharing your experience on social media or publishing a case study.
A few easy ways to help spread awareness:
- Tweet your starter recommendations from @shipfast
- Blog about how a certain starter increased your productivity
- Record a short video showcasing a starter integration
- Submit your NextJS app to Product Hunt built with ShipFast
More exposure brings an ever-growing community to ShipFast for pushing NextJS development to the next level.
