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Say goodby to Server Side Rendering. Prerender.io — SPAs with SEO in mind.
“Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupery
We all ❤️ SPA. In any shape it is. Even does not matter which platform React, Vue, Angular or even Vanilla coding was used for.
Get higher rankings by feeding crawler a static HTML of your Javascript website, without compromising your customers’ experience? That’s the idea gathering us here.
Yesterday and Today
Server-Side Rendering (SSR) worked well for decades. Deliver already parsed HTML data to the client-side. Then the browser easily displaid all the stuff on UI without any additional job. If something has been changed, the page needs to be fully reloaded and reinitialized from the backend.
😳 Wait for a second, but I’m in love with Single Page development! That’s should not be your concern since SSR perfectly works with SPA. You can find a lot of frameworks like next.js or create everything from scratch even. So you will always get a static website with SEO support in mind. The World is saved 🌈
The only concern which must be circling in your mind since you heard about SSR should be related to Client-Side Rendering (CSR). Yeah, we all love it. I won’t make a huge pitstop describing all the differences between SSR vs CSR though (otherwise I bet you wouldn’t even start reading this article).
The common idea around using CSR (which I’m excited about) is that you can spend much less cognitive resources while keeping the complex UI system architecture in balance. See the result at UI instantly. Spend less time while debugging backend-related issues. Let’s discuss what I mean.
What does it take
I hope you love library/framework React as much as I do. Well, the known React.renderDOM() method won’t work here anymore, because DOM API is not accessible on the server. Come and rewrite a lot of codebases they will say 💣 (those who love SSR)!
At least change it in favor of React.hydrate() getting rid of the app crashing…
