This is Part II of a series of posts (Part I), walking you through creating a Strapi + Next.js project from scratch.
🚀 Part II: The Frontend
When building modern web applications, developers often want speed, flexibility, and scalability—without a heavy price tag. That’s where the pairing of Strapi and Next.js, deployed on Vercel’s free tier, shines.
🗉️ Why Strapi and Next.js Work So Well Together
Strapi is an open-source, self-hosted Headless CMS that gives you complete control over your content architecture. Meanwhile, Next.js is a flexible React framework that supports SSG, SSR, and ISR out of the box.
Together, they form a powerful stack for building content-rich, fast, and localized websites with ease.
⚙️ Key Features That Make This Duo Special
1. SSG (Static Site Generation)
With SSG, you can pre-render pages at build time, making them lightning-fast. Pair this with Strapi, and your content is fetched at build time to generate static pages.
Use Case: Blogs, marketing sites, documentation pages.
export async function getStaticProps() {
const res = await fetch("https://your-strapi-domain/api/articles");
const data = await res.json();
return { props: { articles: data } };
}
2. ISR (Incremental Static Regeneration)
Next.js on Vercel lets you update static content after deployment without rebuilding the whole site. This works brilliantly with Strapi, especially for content that changes frequently.
export async function getStaticProps() {
const res = await fetch("https://your-strapi-domain/api/posts");
const data = await res.json();
return {
props: { posts: data },
revalidate: 60, // Re-generate the page at most once every minute
};
}
3. Localization Support
Strapi has built-in i18n support. Combine that with Next.js internationalized routing and you're ready to ship multilingual websites without third-party services.
🏗️ Rapid Prototyping on a Budget
Strapi is free and open source. You can run it locally or host it on inexpensive platforms like Render, Railway, or even free tiers on Heroku. Combined with Vercel’s generous free plan, you can build and deploy production-grade applications with:
- Real-time content editing
- Secure role-based access
- REST or GraphQL APIs out of the box
- Scalable content modeling
🔥 Perfect for Indie Hackers, Startups & Side Projects
Whether you're building a startup MVP or a client project, this stack empowers you to:
- Move fast with reusable components and easy API integrations
- Build SEO-friendly, high-performing pages
- Easily scale as your content or traffic grows
🧪 Example Use Cases
- Multi-language portfolio websites
- Documentation portals
- Headless e-commerce frontends
- Landing pages with CMS-managed content
What's next
🚀 Next up: In the next part of this guide we'll walk you through creating a Strapi backend with an Article content type and localization.
Stay tuned!