The most popular platform of one period was PHP-Nuke, and it handed its lead to Joomla and later to WordPress. Around 20 to 25 years ago I had 5 resellers, 2 of them ASP and 3 of them PHP, and they were hosted in Canada. Taking 4 to 5 seconds to connect to a site was normal for those days, and at bottom the platform did not matter all that much.
Saying that the platform is still the main deciding factor today would be hard, but we can talk about the advantages of platforms that ask for engineering, Next.js among them, at a few separate points.
Advantage + : first of all, because a Next.js site interprets and serves complicated data to users faster, it will bring a speed advantage, and that fundamentally improves the user experience.
Advantage + : you can put out a piece of work that is a wonder of design, improve the rate at which users come back, and produce a site they can move around with pleasure. When we look at award winning sites we generally see React based sites dominating.
Advantage + : Google sets aside a crawl budget for a site, and it holds a good many criteria in view while it decides on that budget. If your site is WordPress and the cache is being cleared constantly, then when Google comes to your site it will both build the cache of that page and record it in its own system. Because of that cache problem, the time it takes to move through a page will rise in milliseconds and you will have spent your crawl budget.
A site built on Next.js has the advantage of Googlebot moving through it quickly, and because your crawl budget is used correctly, more pages get crawled.
Note : We cover this and other subjects that matter a great deal but are not widely known on our technical SEO page.
Could Next.js Be the Future of the Web?
Facebook may not have succeeded in a good many of its projects, but we can say it succeeded with React, the platform it developed for making the interaction between user and server instant. As Türk SEM we are among the CLA signatories of the Meta React developers, and we follow its development closely.
If you are at a fork in your own development process now, or choosing the right platform for a project of any size, and I have to give you a clear recommendation, then I can recommend the Next.js platform. Vercel's proven position builds a belief that they will provide support in the background.
Years ago PHP won the war between ASP and PHP, because the community support was on that side. Now I see the community showing a high level of interest in React based work. That means more options in the technologies of the future and in the products built with them.
Web platforms that Googlebot likes are bound to win. Just as WordPress was grown on the claim that its Google SEO settings were complete, there are similar traces around React based sites.
The Biggest Advantage: Knowledge and Command
Beyond all the technical advantages, the most important rule is this: the platform you know and whose code you have command of is always the best one.
Being able to produce a quick solution to the problems you will meet later is far more valuable than any technical gain. If you have software that throws errors from every side and that you cannot step into, how modern the platform is stops mattering. The real advantage is the platform you can step into quickly when there is trouble, and whose coding you have command of within your knowledge.
The platform you are better at while adding a new feature, or making an existing feature better, holds the most important advantage. AI may be excellent at coding today, but you are the architect and you have to have command of the platform. Sometimes you cannot know what successful results a small touch will produce.
