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Gil Eckstein

Gil Eckstein

Gil is a Performance Architect at Wix Viewer. For the past eight years, he has been helping build the application that powers Wix websites. As part of the Viewer team, Gil works on making it easy for anyone to create their dream website and for developers to extend the functionality of their Wix websites. With over 10 years of experience in software development, Gil started his career in networking and Linux but always had a passion for web development. For the past four years, he’s been leading the Viewer performance team, working on Wix websites performance and ensuring they load as fast as possible. In his free time, Gil likes working out at the park, playing basketball, and working on his personal projects—many of them built with AI ;)
Wix, Israelgil-eckstein-5a0265118
Winning the Hydration Battle: Unlocking React Performance with the Power of Suspense
React Summit US 2025React Summit US 2025
Upcoming
Winning the Hydration Battle: Unlocking React Performance with the Power of Suspense
Rendering a React app with server-side rendering (SSR) can feel bittersweet - on one hand, SSR ensures fast page load and great SEO by rendering the entire page on the server, however the client must download and hydrate all these components to make the page interactive. For pages with lots of content, this can lead to a significant amount of JavaScript being loaded and executed, causing slower interaction times and major performance issues. 

At Wix, we faced a significant challenge: how could we deliver blazing-fast interaction times while avoiding the performance bottleneck of downloading and hydrating every SSR-rendered component on the client? For a long time, this felt like an unsolvable problem - until the new Suspense API changed the game.

In this talk, I’ll share the story of how we tackled this problem head-on, leveraging the new Suspense API introduced in React 18 to dynamically load and hydrate React components only when they enter the viewport. While Suspense's promise-based rendering capabilities aren’t widely documented, they proved to be the game-changing tool we needed to break free from the limitations of traditional hydration and improve the performance of millions Wix websites.

Prepare for a technical deep dive with lots of code examples that will equip you to tackle hydration challenges and boost React performance!
performance