React Patterns That Actually Scale

Simple React apps don't need patterns. Complex ones do. Here are the ones we reach for when a codebase starts to grow.

When a React codebase is small, any structure works. When it grows to dozens of pages and hundreds of components, the choices you made early on start to matter. These are the patterns we've found most useful across the projects we've built.

Composition over configuration

Instead of components with 20 props, build smaller components that compose together. A Button that takes an icon prop is fine. A Card component that takes title, subtitle, image, badge, action, secondaryAction, and footer props is a config object pretending to be a component. Break it into CardHeader, CardBody, CardFooter.

Co-locate related code

Keep components, hooks, types, and tests for a feature in the same directory. Don't spread a feature across /components, /hooks, /types, /tests, and /utils. When you delete a feature, you should be deleting one directory, not hunting through five.

Data fetching patterns

• Fetch data at the page level, pass it down as props
• Use React Server Components for data that doesn't need client interactivity
• Cache aggressively with SWR or React Query for client-side fetching
• Avoid fetching inside deeply nested components - it makes data flow unpredictable

State management: less is more

Most React apps don't need Redux or Zustand. React's built-in useState and useContext handle 80% of cases. URL state (search params) handles another 10%. Only reach for a state management library when you have genuinely complex client-side state that multiple unrelated components need to read and write.

Ben Arledge

CEO & CTO, CloudOwl