Building a Next.js Site Without Any Client-Side Javascript

Next.js is a React framework that lets you build static and server rendered websites by adopting a few simple conventions to hydrate your components. In doing so, you get the flexibility and familiarity of building a site with React & Javascript while also getting the performance and SEO benefits of statically pre-rendering as much of your site as possible.

By default, Next.js preloads a bunch of javascript regardless of whether your site actually needs it. Really simple sites (like this blog), generally don't need any client-side javascript magic. Statically generated emails would also benefit from avoiding client-side javascript since email clients don't execute javascript.

Turns out it's really easy to disable all javascript in your Next.js app (provided you are using the canary build and are comfortable using an experimental feature).

First,

npm install next@canary

Then, add the following to your page:

export const config = {
  unstable_runtimeJS: false,
};

That's it!