Building a React Dashboard from Scratch

Recently, I had the opportunity to build a comprehensive analytics dashboard for a fintech client. In this post, I'll walk you through my approach, the challenges I faced, and the solutions I implemented.

Project Overview

The dashboard needed to:

• Display real-time financial data
• Support multiple user roles with different permissions
• Be responsive across all devices
• Handle large datasets efficiently
• Provide intuitive data visualization

Architecture Decisions

Component Structure

I organized the components into three main layers:

1. Presentational Components - Reusable UI elements
2. Container Components - Logic and state management
3. Page Components - Route-level containers

This separation made the codebase scalable and maintainable.

State Management

I used Redux for global state management because:

• Complex data relationships between different dashboard sections
• Need for time-travel debugging during development
• Team familiarity with Redux patterns

Data Visualization

For charts and graphs, I selected Chart.js with React-ChartJS-2 wrapper because it offered:

• Excellent performance with large datasets
• Customizable styling to match brand colors
• Good documentation and community support

Performance Optimization

Some key optimizations I implemented:

1. Code Splitting - Lazy loaded dashboard sections
2. Memoization - Used React.memo for expensive components
3. Virtual Scrolling - For large data tables with thousands of rows
4. API Caching - Implemented cache layer to reduce API calls

Results

The final dashboard exceeded expectations:

• ✅ 98 Lighthouse performance score
• ✅ Sub-100ms response times for user interactions
• ✅ Support for 10,000+ data points without lag
• ✅ 95% reduction in API calls through caching

This project reinforced the importance of planning architecture early and continuously optimizing for performance.