react-async-component VS react-loadable

I've spent many years working on django including production setups for 3 different companies. My strong advice is to only use Django for API calls (DRF) and the built in admin UI. Do not use Django for ANY client facing static site rendering.

1. Deploy the React static pages and JS/CSS resources completely separately from Django. Cloudfront/S3 is my personal choice. You will need to tweak the CORS_ORIGIN_WHITELIST and CORS_ALLOW_HEADERS in the django settings but that's relatively easy.

2. Use Gatsy or something similar to help you with static site generation using react. Remember: React is in charge of HTML/JS/CSS of any type and Django should not get involved.

3. Use https://github.com/ctrlplusb/react-async-component or something similar to help break up your SPA so the browser doesn't have to load all of it at once and only loads smaller components on an as needed basis.

Don't mess with webpack and eject unless you have a very specialized need that cannot be addressed with everything out there.

Website: https://github.com/jamiebuilds/react-loadable

React Loadable: This library makes it easy to split your React code into smaller, lazy-loaded chunks that can be loaded on demand. This can significantly improve the initial loading time of your application, especially for large and complex apps. https://github.com/jamiebuilds/react-loadable

I have a very simple React component that uses react-loadable to dynamically import another component. The code looks something akin to the following:

react-loadable - A higher order component for loading components with promises

It's very important that you are choosing an active project instead of a dead/unmaintained project. An active project improves over time through community feedback. An unmaintained project does not move forward, fix functional bugs or patch security issues. Sometimes, a very popular package can be abandoned and go into a "frozen" state with many open issues and pull requests. It might have been a great solution in the past, but this is a sign that we have to move on. An example is react-loadable. It was a great solution for a very long time for code-splitting in React. I totally loved it. But it's stale now with many issues and PRs since 2018 (this post is written at the end of 2021). Now, if I need to split code in React, I use loadable-components, which is in active development, becoming more popular, patches bugs reported by the community, and most importantly, solves my problems. My personal advice: choose a package that's active in the last 3-6 months, with issues that are being resolved and PRs that are being merged.

Preloading is possible with react-loadable: https://github.com/jamiebuilds/react-loadable#preloading