Building Reusable Components in React: Best Practices and Patterns

React is one of the most popular JavaScript frontend libraries. It helps developers to build a friendly user interface with the help of component-based architecture. The components of React are flexible, independent, and reusable which makes the user interface more maintainable and scalable. However, it depends on developers to build components that are clean and organized, making them easy to understand and reuse.

In this article, we’ll learn what reusable components are and why they are important in React. Alongside how the best practices and design patterns can help developers build maintainable React reusable components.

What are Reusable Components?

Reusable components are pieces of code that are built to be used again in an application with little or no changes. These are UI elements that allow developers to not write code every time they build a new button, card, or form element. Instead of rewriting code developers can use the same component with different data or settings to build a consistent design across applications.

The reusable components should be generic, customizable, and composable so they can be used again with ease. This saves the time of developers and helps businesses to use more scalable code.

Why Reusability Matters in React?

Reusability in React is not just saving the time of developers and making coding easy, but it also benefits React applications in the following ways:

• It brings consistency throughout the application, which makes friendly user interface.
• It simplifies debugging and maintenance of the application.
• It makes scalable code that helps businesses grow without giving up on performance.

React reusable components act as a building block of an application to build high-performing and future-ready applications.

Best Practices to Build Reusable Components in React

Developers need to build reusable components properly, to get full benefit from it. To do this, it is important to learn the best practices, a few of which are as follows:

1. Begin With the Atomic Design Foundation

Skilled ReactJS developers follow atomic design methodology, whose purpose is to break the user interface into small reusable elements. It allows them to build applications with more structured code. This methodology is made up of the following five levels:

• Atoms: the smallest reusable components in an application, such as buttons, inputs, or labels
• Molecules: the number of atoms working in a group like a product card having a title, image, and price
• Organisms: a set of molecules and atoms working together as the navigation bar, footer, and header.
• Templates: a defined structure using organisms
• Pages: a final page/s showing templates

When businesses hire ReactJS developers, they should make sure that he/she applies these atomic design principles to make components less complex.

2. Make Focused Components

To create more focused components, each one should handle one task. Developers should ensure that each component has one specific task to keep it simple. For example, instead of a heavy , break it into , , and . Each React reusable component can then be reused in other forms, such as cards, lists, or modals.

If the component has more duties, it is difficult to reuse or redesign it in any other case. Making components focused helps developers to enhance the application’s maintainability and scalability. Plus, it makes debugging and testing more convenient.

3. Improve Flexibility with Props

Props make the React reusable components easy to combine with other components, which allows developers to build flexible user interfaces. Props make components more customizable by-passing data, styles, and behaviors to other components. To make sure reusable React components are flexible:

• Establish default values for props, to make components work perfectly even if there are no props provided.
• Make prop API minimum, which means not to overload it.
• Apply PropTypes or TypeScript interfaces to catch bugs at an early stage.
• Provide meaningful titles to the props to increase their readability.

This example will make the concept of props easier to understand:

const Button = ({ label = "Click", type = "button", onClick }) => (
  
    {label}
  
);

In this case, just changing the props of this button component will allow it to be used in different cases.

4. Choose Composition Over Inheritance

React allows developers composition, which means making components by joining other components. This helps developers to build different components by using base components and transferring render logic or children elements.

const Card = ({ children }) => (
  

    {children}
  
); 
// Usage

  
Card Title
  
This is the content.
 

In this example, the Card is the component, and the children are the prop. This pattern allows developers to reuse the card component simply by changing the content transferred inside it.

5. Uniform Styling of Components

It is essential to style React reusable components consistently across the React application. It helps developers to provide a compatible user experience and also makes styling of the whole application easy. Uniform styling in React is fulfilled with the following operations:

• CSS-in-JS: it has libraries like Emotion or Style-components to allow developers to write styles directly in JavaScript code such as,

import styled from 'styled-components';
const Button = styled.button`
background-color: blue;
color: white;
padding: 10px;
border-radius: 5px;
`;

• CSS Modules: it helps to apply style only on the wanted component rather than affecting the whole application. For example:

import styles from './Button.module.css';
const Button = () => (
Click Me
);

• Ready-to-Use Tools: frameworks like Tailwind CSS have built-in classes to apply fonts, colors, and spacing. For example:

const Button = () => ( 
   
    Click Me 
   
);

Top Patterns for Creating React Reusable Components

The right architectural pattern also matters when applying React reusable components. Every React developer should follow the following proven patterns for building clean and consistent reusable components:

1. Presentational and Container Pattern

The purpose of these patterns is to separate UI (look and feel) from the logic (functionality). The two categories of these patterns are as follows:

• Presentational components handle how things look, and they receive data and actions through props.
• Container components handle how things work; they pass data and actions through props.

This pattern is useful in complex React applications because it handles designs and logic separately to help developers divide tasks easily.

2. Custom Hooks

In React, developers can also reuse logic by embedding it with custom hooks and use it again wherever it is needed. Custom hooks are JavaScript functions that begin with use. It can be applied in different cases, such as:

• Form handling, by using the user hook to handle fields and validations in one place
• Toggle state, by applying the useToggle hook to manage open/close logic of modals, dropdowns, and sections.
• Pagination logic, by using the usePagination hook to manage page limit, numbers, and data slices.

It allows developers to keep the UI clean and make logic reusable.

3. Slot/Children-as-Props Patterns in React

This pattern allows components flexibility and lets the component display UI when data is passed, or developers apply it. In React reusable components the special children prop is used to keep UI consistent, flexible, and customizable. It is best suited in the following cases:

• Cards show different content such as product name, price, description, and image. It is applied in different cases with the same card layout.
• Modals is a popup that follows the same design but with different buttons or messages. Using children here to show the same model with a different message.
• Page Layouts or Templates stay the same with header, footer, sidebar, and content area but the content changes with the help of children prop.
• Buttons sometimes are simple and often have an icon or customized text, so adding children’s props to create different versions of buttons with it easy.
• Alert boxes and panels with the same style but different information or alerts can be applied by children.

This pattern allows more flexibility and customization options by staying consistent with the overall application.

Conclusion:

Building React reusable components is not just writing clean code, it also means building scalable and maintainable applications. If developers follow best practices such as atomic design method, focused components, thoughtful props, composition over inheritance, and uniform styling it helps to build a consistent UI system.

Additionally, some patterns ensure that React components are reusable and efficient. By applying these patterns like presentational and container components, custom hooks, and slot/children-as-props patterns, developers can further separate concerns, keep the codebase organized, and ensure that logic is also reusable at its best.