How to Create a Website App with React and Expo

Building a website app isn't just about slapping some code together. The real magic is creating a single application that feels perfectly at home on the web, iOS, and Android—all from one unified codebase. We'll get into the weeds of how to do that with a modern stack like React Native and Expo, but first, let's talk strategy.

Build Your App on a Solid Foundation

Every great app I've ever worked on started long before a single line of code was written. The most critical part of the whole process is the planning phase. It’s here that you set the direction for the project and, more importantly, prevent those costly, soul-crushing mistakes that pop up down the line.

A solid foundation isn't just about picking the right tech. It’s about getting crystal clear on your purpose and truly understanding the people you're building for.

Before you even think about development, you have to nail down the core problem your app is going to solve. Who are you building this for? What specific pain points are you going to eliminate for them? Answering these questions gives you a clear architectural blueprint that will guide every single feature and design choice you make.

Defining Your Path Forward

I've found it helps to break down the initial planning into three simple parts: define your purpose, choose your tools, and find ways to accelerate your timeline. It’s a straightforward approach to building a website app with a clear strategy from day one.

As you can see, everything starts with the user. From there, you pick a tech stack that supports your cross-platform goals and lean on templates to get to market faster.

And while you're at it, don't forget the basics. Making sure your app is robust and trustworthy from the get-go means baking in essential website security best practices from the very beginning.

A rookie mistake I see all the time is jumping straight into coding without a clear plan. Trust me on this: taking the time to nail down your app's purpose, audience, and core features will save you hundreds of hours in rework later.

The Modern Tech Stack Advantage

The technology you choose has a massive impact on your development speed, how well your app can scale, and how painful (or easy) long-term maintenance will be. To create a website app that also runs like a dream on mobile, my go-to recommendation is a specific combination of tools purpose-built for this kind of universal development.

This table gives a quick rundown of the key players in our modern cross-platform tech stack.

Your Modern Cross-Platform Tech Stack

Each of these tools is powerful on its own, but together they form a cohesive ecosystem that just works, letting you focus on building features instead of fighting with your tools.

This combination is about more than just convenience; it’s a strategic choice. The mobile app world is exploding, with global revenue projected to skyrocket to US$1,103.48 billion by 2034. With nearly 998 new apps hitting Google Play every day, speed is your secret weapon. Using pre-built templates lets you launch faster and focus your energy on what makes your app unique.

This cross-platform approach isn't some niche strategy anymore; it's being adopted by startups and huge companies alike. For a deeper dive into the specifics, check out our guide on how to build a mobile app: https://market.gluestack.io/blog/how-to-build-a-mobile-app.

Alright, with a solid plan mapped out, it’s time to get our hands dirty. This is where we stop talking strategy and start building the digital workspace for our new website app. Getting your development environment set up correctly from the get-go is non-negotiable—it’s the difference between a smooth project and a series of frustrating headaches down the line.

The bedrock of our entire stack is Node.js. Think of it as the engine that lets us run JavaScript outside of a browser, powering all our build tools and the local development server. You’ll also want a good code editor. I’m a big fan of Visual Studio Code; it’s wildly popular in the React community for a reason, thanks to its powerful features and massive extension marketplace.

Installing Your Core Tooling

First things first, you need to install Node.js. I always recommend grabbing the Long Term Support (LTS) version directly from the official Node.js website. It’s the most stable choice, especially for projects you plan to take into production.

Once Node.js is on your machine, you'll have access to npm (Node Package Manager). We'll use this to install our main weapon of choice: the Expo Command Line Interface (CLI). Honestly, Expo is what makes building universal React apps a genuinely pleasant experience.

To get it set up, just open your terminal and run this command:

npm install -g expo-cli

That single line gives you everything you need to create, run, and manage your cross-platform projects. If you want a more detailed breakdown, our guide on the complete React Native setup covers every little step.

Creating Your First Universal App Project

Now for the fun part: spinning up a new project. We’ll use an Expo template that comes with TypeScript right out of the box. Trust me, having TypeScript from day one adds a layer of safety and predictability that becomes invaluable as your app starts to grow.

In your terminal, navigate to where you want to store your project and run this:

npx create-expo-app my-website-app -t expo-template-blank-typescript

This command scaffolds a new project called my-website-app, pre-configured with all the TypeScript goodies we need.

Next, let's jumpstart development by bringing in a theme from gluestack market. For this walkthrough, we'll grab a free UI kit. Move into your new project folder (cd my-website-app) and install the dependencies for gluestack-ui. This gives you a whole suite of accessible, production-ready components right away.

My two cents: Don't reinvent the wheel. Seriously. Integrating a well-built UI kit like gluestack-ui at the start saves hundreds of hours. You get accessibility, theme support, and platform consistency for free, which lets you focus on building the features that make your app unique.

Understanding the Project Structure

Once the setup is done, you’ll see a new folder full of files. It can look a bit intimidating at first, but you'll only spend your time in a handful of key places.

Here’s a quick rundown of what matters most:

• app/ directory: This is home base for your screens and navigation logic, all powered by Expo Router. Think of these as the "pages" of your website app.
• components/ directory: A standard spot to keep all your reusable UI bits and pieces—things like custom buttons, cards, or layout containers.
• app.json: This is your app's main configuration file. You’ll tweak things like its name, icon, splash screen, and other platform-specific settings here.
• package.json: This file lists all of your project's dependencies and holds the scripts for running, building, and testing your app.

Running Your App on All Platforms

With everything in place, it’s time for the moment of truth. Let's see this thing run. From your project's root directory, pop open your terminal and run:

npx expo start

This command fires up the Expo development server and opens the Metro Bundler interface in your web browser. From there, you have a few options to see your app live:

1. Press w to open the web version in a new browser tab.
2. Press i to launch the app in an iOS Simulator (this requires Xcode).
3. Press a to launch it in an Android Emulator (this requires Android Studio).

And just like that, you're up and running. You now have a live development environment serving your new app to three different platforms, all from a single command and a single codebase. Pretty cool, right?

Alright, with your development environment all warmed up, we can move past the setup and dive into the fun part: actually building your app. This is where the abstract idea and boilerplate code start to morph into a real, functional, and hopefully beautiful user experience. And it all begins with a smart, scalable architecture.

A well-organized app isn't just a nice-to-have; it's essential for your project's long-term health. Seriously. Taking the time to think about how your files and components fit together from day one will save you from a world of hurt later on. A messy codebase gets exponentially harder to debug, update, and expand as the project grows.

Structuring Your App for Success

The template from gluestack market already gives you a fantastic head start, typically organizing code by features or routes. You'll notice that files related to user authentication—like login, sign-up, and password reset—are all neatly grouped together. This is a battle-tested pattern that makes your code intuitive to navigate.

My advice? Stick with this feature-based structure and build on it. When you’re ready to add a new feature, say a user profile section, just create a new folder for it. Inside that folder, I usually break it down like this:

• screens/: This is where the main screen components live, like UserProfileScreen.tsx and EditProfileScreen.tsx.
• components/: For smaller, reusable UI bits that are specific to the profile feature—think ProfileAvatar.tsx or StatsCounter.tsx.
• hooks/: A great spot for custom React hooks, maybe for fetching user data or handling form logic.

This self-contained approach keeps all the related logic bundled together, making your features feel like mini-apps within your main application.

Customizing the UI with gluestack-ui and NativeWind

Now, let's get to the look and feel. The real magic of using gluestack-ui is its seamless integration with NativeWind, which brings the utility-first goodness of Tailwind CSS over to React Native. Instead of wrestling with separate style sheets, you apply styles directly in your components with those familiar class names.

For instance, a standard button from your template might be as simple as:

<Button text="Sign In" />

But you can easily tweak it on the fly with NativeWind classes:

<Button text="Sign In" className="bg-blue-600 hover:bg-blue-700 rounded-full" />

Just like that, you've completely changed the button's appearance without touching a single line of CSS. It's an incredibly fast way to iterate. If you want to go deeper, there are a ton of great examples in this guide on using Tailwind CSS in React Native.

I can't overstate how much this approach speeds up UI work. You're not constantly switching between your component file and a stylesheet; all the context you need is right there in the markup. It also makes wrangling responsive designs for both web and mobile way more straightforward.

A Practical Example: Modifying a Screen

Let's walk through a real-world task. Imagine your gluestack market template has a pre-built dashboard, but you need to add a "Recent Activity" feed.

1. Find the Screen: First, you’d pop into the app/ directory and locate the DashboardScreen.tsx file.
2. Create a New Component: Over in your components/ folder, you'd create a new file, maybe ActivityFeed.tsx. This component will handle fetching and displaying the activity items.
3. Build the Component: Inside ActivityFeed.tsx, you’ll use gluestack-ui components like Box, Text, and VStack along with NativeWind classes to style the feed. You'd probably map over an array of activity data to render out a list.
4. Import and Render: Finally, jump back into DashboardScreen.tsx, import your new ActivityFeed component, and drop it right into the existing layout.

And that's it. You've just extended the template's functionality without having to rebuild the entire dashboard from the ground up.

Building a New Screen from Scratch

What if you need a brand new screen, like a "Notifications" page? With Expo Router, this is almost laughably easy.

All you have to do is create a new file in your app/ directory—let's call it notifications.tsx. Expo Router sees that file and automatically creates a new route for you, accessible at the /notifications URL.

Inside that new file, you build your screen using the same gluestack-ui components and NativeWind utilities you've been using.

To link to your new page from somewhere else, like your main navigation menu, just use Expo Router's <Link> component:

<Link href="/notifications">View Notifications</Link>

This file-based routing system completely removes the headache of managing complex navigation configurations, letting you just focus on building the pages. When you combine this with a library of pre-built UI components, you can add new, fully-styled features to your app in a fraction of the time it would take otherwise.

With the structure in place and a beautiful UI ready to go, it's time to breathe some life into your application. This is the fun part, where we pivot from what the app looks like to what it does. We're about to wire up the business logic that transforms those static screens into a dynamic, interactive tool that actually solves a problem for your users.

A great app is so much more than a slick design. Its real value comes from its functionality—how it manages user input, fetches live data, and makes sure the whole experience feels snappy and inclusive. This is the engine under the hood.

Handling User Input with Forms

Just about every app needs to collect information from users. Think sign-up forms, search bars, or settings pages. Trying to manage form state by hand—tracking what the user types, validating it, and handling submissions—can get incredibly messy, really fast. This is exactly why libraries like Formik or React Hook Form are non-negotiable in my toolkit.

Instead of cobbling together a dozen useState hooks for every single input field, these tools give you a clean, structured way to manage the entire form's lifecycle. They take care of validation, error messages, and submission states, which absolutely demolishes the amount of boilerplate code you'd otherwise have to write.

Let's say you're building a simple login form. The process looks something like this:

1. Define Your Schema: Using a validation library like Zod or Yup, you define the "shape" of your form data and its rules. For instance, the email must be a valid format, and the password must have at least 8 characters.
2. Hook Up the Form: You connect your form library to this schema, and it just handles all the validation logic for you. It's almost like magic.
3. Build the UI: You then use your gluestack-ui components like <Input> and <Button>, linking them to the state managed by your chosen form library.

Pairing this approach with TypeScript is a game-changer. TypeScript locks in the shape of your form data, catching potential bugs where you might accidentally try to access a field that doesn't even exist.

One of the biggest time-sinks I see junior developers fall into is writing custom form logic from scratch. Adopting a battle-tested form library from day one isn't just a best practice; it's a massive productivity boost. You'll build reliable forms in minutes, not hours.

Fetching and Managing Data from APIs

Your app probably isn't going to live in a vacuum. It'll need to talk to a server to fetch or send data—loading user profiles, submitting new posts, you name it. While you can use the browser's built-in fetch API, modern data-fetching libraries like TanStack Query (which you might remember as React Query) offer a vastly superior developer experience.

These libraries handle all the tricky bits of data synchronization for you, right out of the box:

• Caching: They automatically store data so you don't have to re-fetch the same information over and over.
• Background Updates: Data stays fresh behind the scenes, often without the user even noticing.
• Loading and Error States: It becomes trivially easy to show a loading spinner or an error message.

For example, fetching a user's data can be as simple as creating a custom hook. Inside that hook, TanStack Query makes the API request. In your component, you just call the hook and instantly get back the data, along with handy booleans like isLoading and isError. This makes building a robust, responsive UI around your data an absolute breeze.

Building for Everyone: Why Accessibility Matters

When you build an app, you have a responsibility to make it usable for everyone, including people with disabilities. Accessibility isn't some extra feature you tack on at the end; it's a fundamental part of building a professional, high-quality product. Plus, studies have shown that accessible websites often have better SEO and reach a much wider audience. Win-win.

Fortunately, gluestack-ui was built with accessibility as a first-class citizen. It provides props that map directly to web accessibility standards (like ARIA attributes) and native mobile accessibility features.

Here are a few quick wins you can implement right away:

• accessibilityLabel: Always provide a descriptive label for components that don't have visible text, like an icon-only button. This is what a screen reader will announce to visually impaired users.
• accessibilityRole: Clearly define an element's purpose, such as 'button', 'header', or 'link'. This gives assistive technologies the context they need to understand your UI's structure.

Adding these simple props takes seconds but can make a world of difference to someone relying on a screen reader.

Keeping Your App Fast and Responsive

Let's be honest: performance is a feature. A slow, janky app will drive users away, no matter how amazing it looks. As your application grows, you have to be mindful of how your components render and how you handle computationally expensive tasks.

Two of the most powerful techniques in React for tackling this are lazy loading and memoization.

• Lazy loading lets you split your code into smaller chunks and load them only when they're actually needed. For example, you can lazy-load a complex modal or an entire screen that isn't immediately visible, which dramatically improves your app's initial load time.
• Memoization, using tools like React.memo for components or the useMemo hook for values, prevents unnecessary re-renders. If a component's props haven't changed, React can skip the work of re-rendering it, saving precious processing power and keeping your UI feeling silky smooth.

Getting Your App Into Users' Hands: Testing and Deployment

You’ve poured everything into building your app—now for the final, most rewarding part: getting it out into the world. This last mile is all about making sure everything works perfectly through solid testing and then pushing it live to the web, the App Store, and Google Play. This is where a project becomes a real, live product.

Don't think of this as just a final box to check. A rock-solid testing and deployment strategy is what separates a buggy, forgotten app from a stable, successful one that people love to use.

A No-Nonsense Testing Strategy

Before you even dream of hitting that deploy button, you need total confidence in your code. The best way to catch those sneaky bugs early is with a few different layers of testing. Trust me, it saves a world of pain later. For a deep dive, it's worth brushing up on software testing best practices.

Here’s the simple breakdown I stick to:

• Unit Tests: These are your first line of defense. They check the tiny, individual pieces of your code, like a single function or a component's internal logic. A tool like Jest is perfect for this. You can set it up to run automatically whenever you make changes, so you instantly know if you've broken something.
• End-to-End (E2E) Tests: Think of these as a robot that uses your app just like a real person would. Tools like Detox or Maestro can automate tapping buttons, filling in forms, and moving between screens to make sure critical user journeys work from start to finish.

My personal take? Start with Jest for your core logic. Once that's solid, layer in a few crucial E2E tests for the most important user flows—like signing up or making a purchase. This gives you great coverage without bogging down your development speed.

Launching Your App on the Web

Getting your website live is almost ridiculously easy these days, thanks to platforms built for modern web apps. Services like Vercel or Netlify make deploying a React-based app feel like magic.

First, you need to create a production-ready version of your site. From your project's root folder, you'll run the command Expo provides:

npx expo export --platform web

This command crunches all your code, optimizes your images, and bundles it all into a neat dist or web-build folder. After that, you just connect your GitHub repository to a service like Vercel, tell it where to find that build folder, and you're done. Seriously. Every time you push a change to your main branch, Vercel will automatically redeploy the site for you.

Submitting to the App Stores

Okay, mobile deployment is a bit more of a process, but Expo Application Services (EAS) makes it so much simpler. EAS is a cloud service that handles the tricky part of building the native .ipa (iOS) and .aab (Android) files that the app stores require.

The general workflow looks like this:

1. Configure Your Project: You’ll set up a file called eas.json to define your build settings for development, preview, and production.
2. Run the Build Command: A simple command like eas build --profile production sends your code to the cloud to be built.
3. Submit to the Stores: Once the builds are finished, eas submit can automatically upload the files to Apple’s App Store Connect and the Google Play Console for you.

To give you some context, a medium-complexity React Native app can take 855-1,390 development hours, costing anywhere from $42,750 to $69,500. But here's the kicker: by starting with production-ready templates from a place like gluestack market, you can slash those timelines and costs by 20-40%. This is a huge advantage, letting you get your MVP launched in weeks, not months.

Polishing Your App Store Listings

Finally, don’t sleep on your app store presence. This is your digital storefront. A sloppy listing can kill your download numbers before you even get started.

Spend real time on this. Get compelling screenshots that show off your best features, write a description that’s clear and exciting, and pick keywords that will help people find you. A polished listing signals quality and makes people want to hit that "Install" button.

Common Questions About Building Website Apps

When you start diving into universal apps, a few questions always pop up, especially when you're trying to build a website that needs to feel just as good on a phone. It's smart to get these concerns out of the way early, because the answers really show off what the React Native and Expo ecosystem is capable of. Let's tackle a few of the big ones.

A lot of developers are skeptical at first. Can something born for mobile really deliver a snappy experience on the web? It's a fair question.

Can React Native Really Build a High-Performance Website?

Absolutely. Modern tooling like Expo uses a library called React Native for Web, which is brilliant at translating your universal components into standard, semantic HTML. Now, it's not going to be identical to a site you hand-coded from scratch in React.js, but for the vast majority of apps—think complex dashboards, social platforms, and e-commerce stores—the performance is fantastic.

The secret sauce is that libraries like gluestack-ui are built with web performance in mind from day one, making sure every component is lean and responsive. The real win, though, is having just one codebase. That single factor cuts down on development and maintenance time so drastically compared to the headache of juggling separate web and mobile projects.

Okay, so what about the inevitable little differences between platforms? You know, those unique quirks you find on the web versus iOS or Android.

How Do I Handle Platform-Specific Code?

This is another area where Expo and React Native have some elegant answers. The go-to method is using platform-specific file extensions. You can create a Component.web.tsx, a Component.native.tsx, and even drill down to Component.ios.tsx or Component.android.tsx. The bundler is smart enough to just grab the right file for the platform it's building for.

For tiny, inline tweaks, you can pull in the Platform module directly from React Native:

if (Platform.OS === 'web') { /* Run this little bit of code only on the web */ }

And when it comes to styling, tools like NativeWind handle most of the responsive stuff for you. But for those moments you need that extra bit of control, you can use platform-specific prefixes right in your class names, like web:bg-blue-500 to apply a style only on the web. It's incredibly clean.

A lot of teams I talk to worry that platform-specific code will make their project a mess. In practice, these tools keep things incredibly organized. You'll find that 95% of your code is truly universal, with only small, targeted adjustments needed for the last 5%.

What Are the Downsides of Using a Template?

The main "limitation" of starting with a template is that you begin with a pre-defined architecture and design system—which, ironically, is also its biggest strength. Because you get full source code access, these templates from places like gluestack market are 100% customizable. You can change literally anything you want.

The only real trade-off is the little bit of time you'll spend learning the template's structure. But that's almost always a tiny fraction of the time it would take to build everything—authentication, navigation, state management, and a full UI library—from scratch. Templates are for teams who want to move fast and focus on what makes their app unique, not on boilerplate.

How Does SEO Work for an Expo Web App?

This is a big one, and thankfully, Expo for Web has you completely covered. It plays nicely with frameworks like Next.js and has its own powerful file-based routing system (Expo Router) that fully supports server-side rendering (SSR). That's a non-negotiable for getting search engines to properly index your site.

You get full control to manage metadata like titles and descriptions for every page, manipulate the <head> tags, and generate a sitemap.xml just like you would with any other modern web framework. Using a well-structured template gives you a massive head start here, as the routing and page structure are already set up with SEO best practices in mind.

Ready to stop building from scratch and start shipping your app idea? The gluestack market offers a huge library of production-ready templates and UI kits to help you build and launch faster. Explore the marketplace and find the perfect foundation for your next project.