The Yin and Yang of Next.js 13 — Understanding Server Components and Server-Side Rendering

Adhithi Ravichandran
7 min readJul 17, 2023

Hello friends! It’s been a while since I wrote a blog post. With a new baby at home, I have been super busy!

Today, we’re going to tackle two buzzwords that have been floating around the React ecosystem: Server Components and Server-Side Rendering (SSR). There seems to be a sense of confusion among the newbies in the React community in grasping these two concepts.

Let’s demystify them and see how they differ in this blog post!

Whats new in Next.js 13 ?

https://nextjs.org/ Logo

Before we get started let’s see what’s new in Next.js 13.

In Next.js 13, there is a new App Router within the directory /app. This contains support for React’s Server Components, and several other new features and opitmizations. All of this is still new and recently the /app folder has been marked stable with version 13.4.

The good news is you can now use the /app folder in production, and tap into some of the new features like Server Components. But since everything is so new, there is still some confusion in the community on how to…

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Adhithi Ravichandran

Software Consultant, Author, Speaker, React|Next.js|React Native |GraphQL|Cypress|Playwright Dev & Indian Classical Musician