And here ' s me with no Sakura . <| sep |> And is this the best approach or is there a better alternative ? This is a solid approach , youcan use the onEnter hook that reactrouter provides to send an ajax request and handle it with Redux for example . So the flow would look like this 1 . user navigates to postpostname 2 . onEnter is called , and produces an fetch action to be consumed by Redux 3 . Post component is loaded and since the data isn ' t yet fetched , displays a placeholder Facebook mockplaceholders are a good example here 4 . Once your ajax requests finishesh and data is put in Redux store the Post component rerenders with correct informationAlternatively you can not use onEnter with this , but implement it with componentWillMount on component level .