Web applications can get very complicated, very quickly. One thing I’ve learned as a developer is that you can do a lot with old JavaScript if you give it the chance.
The localStorage API is a powerful built-in feature that eliminates the need to use databases for simple applications that do not require a server. We may use this API to locally store data items accessible by our application.
In this guide, we will explain how to use the localStorage method in JavaScript. We’ll see an example of using localStorage to save the contents of a form for later on a web page. Let’s get started !
What is localStorage ?
localStorage is part of the Web Storage API. This API allows you to store data that your application can access in a user’s browser.
The Archive API is useful because it means that you don’t need to submit all of a user’s session data to a database. If a user turns on dark mode on your site, you can track them on the client side; if a user saves a form for later, it is not necessary to store the partially completed form in the database.
There are two types of web archiving. localStorage is data that will remain in a user’s browser window even after closing the browser tab. Unlike cookies, localStorage data is provided without an expiration date. sessionStorage is data that lasts until a session expires or the browser is closed.
In this article, we’ll focus on the localStorage object. However, you can replace it with sessionStorage because they both use the same syntax.
How to use localStorage
Before going deeper into our example, let’s take a look at the methods offered by localStorage.