preact - a smaller alternative to reactjs
and still standing on the shoulders of giants.
After doing some projects in react from 2018 on, I recently decide to switch to preact, because:
- they way they configured webpack with all the required plugins and their choice of defaults. Also this setup guides you to structure your code.
- how easy it is to setup the router and break the single-page-application-paradigma.
- that its build for speed and allows you to reach 100% in performance score in lighthouse out of the box and does all these things like code-splitting, conditional-, lazy-loading, progressive enhancement, module/no-module for you.
- they way css are handled and also this beautiful explanation why.
- last but not least: Its small footprint which allows it to be integrated into existing sites.
And with react as a fallback you are still standing on the shoulders of giants.
Micro-Frontend / Web-Components
You (as a freelancer) are not always in the position to build a whole SPA. More often there is some existing website which can not be touched.
So you have to embed a component into an existing site. This is where the size of the library you use is is very important. So with preact its easier to build more web-components like components. The smaller the footprint, the less I’m afraid to bundle the application code, together with the library code into a single file and load it with a single page request.

Here are some things I build with (p)react:
02
preact onepager
a preact onpager including a responsive video solution which loads depending on pano / sky
more
03
react gutenberg
a gutenberg-block using native redux inside the wordpress-editor
wp plugin on github
05
react component
a react component for a wordpress site, consuming wordpress media rest-api
read more