React, Inertia & Laravel: The Pragmatic Full-Stack Trio I Ship With
When to reach for Next.js vs Inertia.js vs a decoupled SPA. Bundle budgets, colocation patterns, and keeping Core Web Vitals green.
My default decision tree
Admin dashboards and SaaS apps: Laravel + Inertia + React. You keep server-side routing and auth, ship SPA fluidity, and skip building a separate API for your own frontend.
Marketing + storefront: Next.js headless against a Laravel REST API. ISR gives you sub-100ms TTFB and 98+ Lighthouse without trying.
Only go fully decoupled SPA when you have multiple clients (web + mobile + partners) consuming the same API from day one.
Keeping it fast
Partial reloads in Inertia are underused — request only the props that changed. On FinPulse this cut dashboard payloads from 380KB to 42KB.
Code-split by route, defer charts with dynamic imports, and push filtering to the server with debounced queries. Your bundle budget is 180KB gzipped; everything above needs justification.
verifiedKey takeaways
- arrow_rightInertia for apps, Next.js for sites, SPA only for multi-client APIs.
- arrow_rightPartial reloads are the highest-ROI Inertia feature.
- arrow_rightServer-filter, client-render for data-heavy UIs.