To make things easier!

Common libraries (vue-meta, vue-router, vuex) already included out of the box

Supercharged page components (asyncData, fetch)

Webpack and Babel configured out of the box

Predefined folder structure based on Best Practices and used for Routing

PostCSS (with Autoprefixer) by default

Code splitting per page

Automatic loading of critical CSS

Minification out of the box for both: CSS and JS

Preloading of other pages

after important content

HTTP2 push support

GZIP compression (in SSR mode)

Modern mode

Server-Side-Rendering (Universal)

"Typical" SPA

Static Generation

Programmatic usage

One config file: nuxt.config.js

Nuxt modules

Nuxt hooks

Nuxt plugins

Useful stack traces

No footguns

Always improving Documentation

Elegant solutions

Backend

1. Request

4. HTML

DB

2. Query

3. Results

But: "Click and wait" for every page

CDN

1. Request

2. JS

3. Parsing

API

4. Request

5. Response

Advantage: No extra load for further pages

Problem: Parsing, no "instant" content

-> bad SEO and bad UX

Node.js

Server

1. Request

4. HTML

API

2. Request

3. JSON

5. Download and Execute JS

6. Client-side Hydration (now works as "normal SPA")

API

6. (optional) Request

7. (if 6.) JSON

SEO boost

Faster Time to First Paint and Time to Content

Only one server call ("best of both worlds")

Easier Security (via CSP)

Small caveats

(like no `window` on server-side)

Prone to memory leaks

Needs a server running all time

(requires Node.js >= 8 and NPM >= 5.2.0)

NPM

Yarn

npx create-nuxt-app MYPROJECT

yarn create nuxt-app MYPROJECT