How to Convert HTML Website to ReactJS in Five Simple Steps

If you’re not sure what ReactJS is, it’s time to get clued in on this JavaScript library that has become all the rage in the world of web development. If you work as a web developer, especially one with an HTML background, you may have heard about Hire ReactJS Developer and wondered how to convert your HTML website to ReactJS.

Here are five simple steps that can guide you through this process, so you can launch your next project without feeling overwhelmed by the task at hand. It’s worth mentioning that these five steps won’t make up the entirety of your conversion process reactjs.

1. Decide What Parts of Your Page Need JS

In the process of converting a website from HTML to JavaScript, you may find yourself with some static content that will need Javascript. You can do this by having different parts of the page require jQuery or react-router. We use jquery on some links and react-router on others.

This helps us keep track of which links require JS as well as knowing which pages are getting converted so we can optimize what pages need JS and when they’re done.

Next, we’ll need to add ES6 syntax: One benefit of going from HTML to JavaScript is being able to take advantage of ES6 syntax like arrow functions and async/await. These features simplify the code making it easier for developers who might not be comfortable writing JavaScript at first glance.

2. Move Logic From Templates Into Components

This will be the meat of the work. Converting old templates into react components. Once you have an idea of where everything was, start moving code out of templates and into components. Consider using ES6 classes if you need multiple instances of a component, or legacy functions if you only have one instance.

To avoid confusion with browser specific syntax, use Babel for compiling instead of whichever compile-to-browser engine you were using before like Gulp or Grunt.

Keep your old index.html file as is (do not delete it), but rename it as index.jsx and add this line: import render from ‘react-dom/server’; at the top of the file, just below any import statements.

3. Use CSS-in-JS Libraries

The final step is to modify the site’s CSS file so that it utilizes css-in-js libraries like JSS, Radium, etc. which only require a few lines of code to work. The best way is by rewriting all the CSS declarations into Javascript expressions.

This will result in an ever so slightly higher performance website which load at a fraction of the time that it would have taken when loaded with JavaScript and separate CSS files. You’ll also be able to keep using CSS pre-processors like SASS or LESS while they compile down to regular CSS automatically.

One other benefit is that you don’t need to worry about bundle sizes because you can break up your style sheet into logical sections, just as you do for JavaScript files.

First off, let’s install Radium – a fast and minimalistic library for styling React components inline: npm install radium –save

After installing the library, we need to add two import statements near the top of our document: import { radium } from ‘radium’; import ‘./style.scss’;

Finally, create an instance of Radium (this lets us use global variables inside the scope) at the bottom of our document before any other script tags: const {radium} = document;
Now everything should work!

4. Create a Virtual DOM Using JSDOM Library

Beware the DOM is expensive, so it’s not an appropriate tool for manipulating documents. Usually we convert an HTML page into a Virtual DOM tree, that can be queried and manipulated with JavaScript and rendered with either direct DOM methods or various layout engine implementations.

We’ll create our new virtual DOM node class by extending the built-in Node class, adding a constructor method that takes as parameters the tag name (what will be displayed on screen) and some attributes: name, id, data-* props…

The trick is to take the original document, parse it into its textual form (tagged token array), build up a document object model in memory by adding nodes corresponding to the tags seen and finally turn this VDOM tree back into an equivalent markup string of text.

5. Load Data Asynchronously

JavaScript is an asynchronous programming language, which means that functions do not have the execution time constrains of a synchronous programming language. In practice, this means that you can request data from a server without halting the browser’s rendering process and much more.

Asynchronous code is called via JavaScript libraries, and it is possible to execute different kinds of asynchronous tasks with them. One of the most popular ones is jQuery’s AJAX function .

It provides methods such as get() and post(), which both allow you to submit data to the specified URL in order to fetch content via HTTP requests.