Introducing: React Best Practices
By Steven Van ·
Vercel's open-source repo gives coding agents 40+ impact-rated rules for fixing React and Next.js performance issues.
Vercel has published react-best-practices, a repository of React and Next.js performance rules meant to be read by AI coding agents rather than humans. It packages over ten years of optimization knowledge into more than 40 rules across eight categories, each rated by impact from CRITICAL down to LOW, so an agent can prioritise fixes instead of guessing.
The rules are ordered deliberately: eliminating async waterfalls and reducing bundle size come first, since Vercel says those two issues usually move real-world metrics before anything else does. Server-side performance, client-side data fetching, re-render optimization, rendering performance, JavaScript performance, and advanced patterns follow. Each rule includes code examples showing an incorrect pattern and the fix. The repository is on GitHub, originally created by Vercel's Shu Ding, and is open to contributions.