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Server Side Rendering of Tailwind CSS styles in NextJS

11/8/2022 •7.5K views •2 min read


NextJS provides us with SSR capabilities by rendering the page in the server.

Although, if you are Tailwind for styling, you'll notice that the styles are not applied on the server rendered pages.

For this to work, we need to enable an experimental feature in next.config.js

1 2 3 4 5 6 const nextConfig = { //... experimental: { optimizeCss: true, // enabling this will enable SSR for Tailwind }, };

We also need to install Critters

1 yarn add -D critters

Next.JS will internally use this library called Critters

Now, all you do is yarn build and then yarn start.

Make a Postman call and under "Preview" you could see that the Tailwind styles are now getting applied at the server!

Here are the before and after screenshots:

Before

You can see that no styles are applied on the server rendered page.

Screenshot of before the change
Screenshot of before the change

After

After the changes are made, you can see that the styles are applied on the server rendered page.

Screenshot of after the change
Screenshot of after the change

Gotcha:

If you are using the @tailwindcss/typography plugin, you'd notice these warnings in your logs.

More info here


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