Can you use dynamic imports with static site generators in JavaScript?

13 Oct 2023

Static site generators have become popular in recent years due to their ability to create fast and efficient websites. However, one limitation of static site generators is the lack of support for dynamic imports, which can limit the flexibility and interactivity of the generated sites.

But with the advancements in JavaScript, dynamic imports are now supported in modern browsers, and we can leverage them with static site generators to achieve dynamic behavior in our websites.

What are Dynamic Imports?

Dynamic imports allow us to load JavaScript modules on-demand, as opposed to the traditional approach of loading all modules upfront. This can be useful in scenarios where we want to load certain features or components of our website only when needed, which can help improve performance and reduce initial load times.

Using Dynamic Imports with a Static Site Generator

To use dynamic imports with a static site generator, we first need to ensure that our chosen static site generator supports JavaScript dynamic imports. Most modern static site generators have built-in support or plugins available for this purpose.

Let’s take an example using a popular static site generator, such as Gatsby. Gatsby supports dynamic imports out of the box, making it a perfect choice for our scenario.

Install Gatsby: npm install -g gatsby-cli
Create a new Gatsby site: gatsby new my-site
Go into the project directory: cd my-site
Create a new page or component where we want to use dynamic imports, for example, src/pages/DynamicPage.js.
Inside DynamicPage.js, we can write our code to import modules dynamically.

import React, { useEffect, useState } from "react";

const DynamicPage = () => {
    useEffect(() => {
        import("./path/to/your/module").then((module) => {
            // Use the imported module here
        });
    }, []);

    return (
        <div>
            {/* Content */}
        </div>
    );
}

export default DynamicPage;

In the above example, we are using the import() function to dynamically import a module. This can be done inside a useEffect hook or any other suitable event handler.

Finally, we can use <DynamicPage> component in our Gatsby project to render the dynamically imported content.

import React from "react"
import DynamicPage from "./src/pages/DynamicPage"

const Home = () => {
    return (
        <div>
            <h1>Home Page</h1>
            <DynamicPage />
        </div>
    )
}

export default Home

Conclusion

Dynamic imports allow static site generators to incorporate dynamic behavior and improve the performance of our websites. By leveraging the support for dynamic imports in modern JavaScript, we can load specific modules on-demand, resulting in faster loading times and a more interactive user experience.

While the above example uses Gatsby as the static site generator, the concept of dynamic imports can be applied to other static site generators as well, with appropriate support or plugins.

Using dynamic imports with static site generators opens up new possibilities for creating highly performant and interactive websites, giving developers more flexibility in building the best user experience.

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