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7 Common Mistakes to Avoid When Using Lightning Web Components
Published on May 21, 2025
Overview
Lightning Web Components, or LWC, has revolutionised the Salesforce development environment by offering a fast, modern, and standards-based framework. They allow the developers to craft responsive, reusable components that improve user experience and performance on the platform. However, while LWCs provide great power and flexibility, most developers, both beginners and experienced, often make common mistakes that can hurt maintainability, cause bugs, or degrade performance.
To get the most out of Lightning Web Components in Salesforce, it is necessary to avoid the 7 common mistakes, including: ignorance of Lightning Base Components, hardcoding strings instead of using Custom Labels, misusing decorators like @track, @api, and @wire, overusing inline logic inside components, overlooking lifecycle hooks, missing out on proper error handling, and neglecting performance optimization.
Let us now explore each of these mistakes in detail and discuss the best practices to build efficient, scalable, and robust LWCs.
Why Are Lightning Web Components in Salesforce Game-Changers?
Before we explore the common mistakes made by developers with Lightning Web Components (LWCs), it is essential to understand why this framework has revolutionised Salesforce development.
Lightning Web Components (LWCs) have transformed Salesforce development by embracing modern web standards to create faster, cleaner, and more scalable apps. They are developed on modern web standards such as ES6+, Custom Elements, and Shadow DOM, making them lightweight, efficient, and convenient to maintain. Here’s why they’re regarded game changers:
- Standards-Based Development: Built on native JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, reducing reliance on proprietary code.
- Improved Performance: Lightweight architecture reduced overhead and accelerates rendering.
- Reusable Components – Modular design promotes reusability and easier maintenance.
- Smooth Integration – Works effortlessly with Aura, Apex, and third-party tools.
- Future-Ready – Aligns with evolving web technologies for long-term scalability.
However, to leverage the full potential of these benefits offered by Lightning Web Components, developers must follow best practices and avoid common pitfalls.
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What Are the Common Mistakes to Avoid While Using Lightning Web Components?
While Lightning Web Components in Salesforce provide a powerful and effective way of building Salesforce applications, even professionals can fall into avoidable traps. These mistakes not only affect the performance but also lead to code that’s difficult to maintain and scale. Let’s explore the seven most common mistakes to avoid while using Lightning Web Components:
1) Ignoring Lightning Base Components
Salesforce offers a rich library of Lightning Base Components like lightning-button, lightning-input, lightning-datatable, and many more. Such components adhere to the Salesforce Lightning Design System (SLDS) and offer built-in accessibility, responsiveness, and style consistency.
Developers who skip using these base components while building UI elements from scratch often risk:
- Wasting development time duplicating functionality.
- Creating inconsistent user experiences.
- Missing out on platform optimisations integrated into the base components.
Best Practice: Always check whether a base component meets your requirements before developing custom components. Using these components accelerates development and ensures your app feels like a native part of Salesforce.
2) Hardcoding Strings Instead of Using Custom Labels
A commonly overlooked best practice is handling user-facing text properly. Hardcoding strings such as button labels, messages, and URLs directly in the code makes your components rigid and difficult to maintain. This results in:
- Difficulty supporting multiple languages or localising your app.
- Inability for admins or translators to update labels without redeployment.
- Reduced clarity due to the mixing of business logic and UI content.
Best Practice: To externalise all user-visible text, use Salesforce Custom Labels. This allows for easy localisation, dynamic updates, and clean separation of concerns.
3) Misusing @track, @api, and @wire
Decorators in LWC like @track, @api, and @wire are essential for controlling reactivity, component communication, and data retrieval. However, misconceptions about their appropriate usage may lead to bugs and inefficient rendering. The most common misuses include:
- Using @track on every property, even though primitive properties are reactive by default.
- Exposing internal state with @api, breaking encapsulation.
- Not handling errors or data loading states properly in @wire.
Best Practice:
- Use @track only when it is required to reactively observe changes within nested objects or arrays.
- Use @api only to expose properties or methods that are meant for public access by parent components.
- Handle data and error states carefully in @wire methods.
4) Overusing Inline Logic in Components
Embedding sophisticated logic straight into templates or component functions might clutter your code and make maintenance difficult. This may cause the following issues:
- Templates are becoming hard to read with complicated expressions.
- Performance issues occur when logic triggers excessive re-renders.
- Difficulty writing unit tests for scattered logic.
Best Practice: Keep your HTML templates clean and declarative. Move complex calculations or conditional logic into JavaScript getters, helper functions, or separate utility modules.
5) Ignoring Lifecycle Hooks
Lifecycle hooks like connectedCallback(), disconnectedCallback(), and renderedCallback() provide prospects for initialising data, managing DOM interactions, and cleaning up resources. These hooks can result in bugs or resource leaks if they are not used properly. Not only that, but the common pitfalls also include:
- Putting expensive or recursive operations inside renderedCallback() without safeguards.
- Forgetting to remove event listeners or timers in disconnectedCallback(), leading to memory leaks.
- Overlooking errorCallback() for catching unexpected errors.
Best practice: Make use of lifecylce hooks systematically for setup, teardown, and handling DOM interactions. Additionally, to prevent endless loops and clear up listeners in disconnectedCallback(), always remember to guard renderedCallback().
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6) Skipping Error Handling
Robust error handling is paramount but often neglected in LWCs. Whether you are calling Apex techniques imperatively or using @wire for fetching data, failure to handle errors efficiently affects user experience and debugging. The different problems that result out of this include:
- Silent failures that confuse users.
- Difficulties tracking down bugs.
- Reduced reliability of components.
Best Practice: Handle the errors explicitly in all asynchronous operations. Further, display meaningful error messages or fallback UI, and use try-catch blocks for promises and the errorCallback() hook for uncaught errors.
7) Not Optimizing Performance
Performance is a major strength of LWCs, but careless coding may result in the degradation of responsiveness and user experience. The most common performance killers include:
- Executing heavy computations inside lifecycle hooks or getters that run frequently.
- Making redundant API calls or wiring multiple times unnecessarily.
- Leaving event listeners or timers running after components unmount.
Best Practice: Cache data where appropriate, debounce input handlers to reduce rapid calls, minimize reactivity to essential variables only, and clean up resources properly in disconnectedCallback().
Final Checklist for Using Lightning Web Components in Salesforce
Now that you are aware of the common mistakes to avoid while using Lightning Web Components in Salesforce, here’s a final checklist to help you get started:
- Make use of Lightning Base Components whenever possible.
- Store all user-facing strings in Custom Labels.
- Use decorators in an appropriate manner: @track only for nested reactivity, @api for public APIs, and @wire with proper data/error handling.
- Keep your templates simple; move logic to JavaScript helpers.
- Leverage lifecycle hooks for setup and cleanup without causing infinite loops.
- Always implement error handling for data fetching and asynchronous calls.
- Optimize performance by controlling reactivity, caching data, and cleaning up listeners.
Conclusion
Lightning Web Components in Salesforce provide everything you require for building fast, modern, and dynamic Salesforce apps, but only if used properly. By avoiding these seven common mistakes while using the platform, you not just write better codes but also create experiences that your users will love.
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Ready to build smarter with Lightning Web Components? Partner with Avatu Private Limited and take your success to the next level!
Ready to unlock the full potential of Lightning Web Components? Partner with Avatu for smarter Salesforce development!
Frequently Asked Questions
@track is used for private reactive properties within a component, while @api is made use of for exposing public properties or methods to parent components for interaction.
Yes, you can mix Aura components with LWC in your Salesforce app, but keep in mind that LWCs can be used inside Aura components, not the other way around. This enables gradual migration from Aura to LWC.
You must avoid hardcoding labels in your LWC code because hardcoding makes localisation and maintenance difficult. On the contrary, Custom Labels allows translation assistance and easier updates without changing the code.
You must use the renderedCallback() lifecycle hook only when you need to interact with the DOM after rendering. Try and avoid placing heavy logic there to prevent performance issues or infinite loops.
To handle errors from Apex methods in LWC, use try-catch in async/await blocks. For @wire, handle errors in the result object using conditional checks or error callbacks.
