How a Next.js Developer Kept an Animation-Heavy Landing Page Fast

A developer building the CogniPrep marketing homepage faced performance challenges due to interactive game demos, scroll animations, and multiple heavy components loading at once. The solution involved server-rendering only the above-the-fold hero section to ensure a fast Largest Contentful Paint, while deferring all other content. Client-only components like canvas-based game demos were loaded using Next.js's dynamic import with server-side rendering disabled. An Intersection Observer was used to delay fetching code chunks until a user scrolled within 200 pixels of the relevant section. Tools like next/bundle-analyzer, next/image, and next/font helped identify deferrable libraries and eliminate layout shifts, resulting in load times comparable to a static page.