SEO: Server-side Rendering vs Client-side Rendering
Introduction
SEO is the process of improving your website’s visibility in search engines. It’s not a one-time thing; it happens over time as people use your site and search engines learn more about what you have to offer.
SEO is not just about keywords. It’s about the discoverability of your content by search engine bots. You need to create a website that is easy for people to understand but also easy for search engines to understand. It becomes difficult for search engine bots to understand the site structure, content, and context of the pages when it comes to any JS-based frameworks such as ReactJS.
In this blog, I’ll discuss the difference between server-side rendering (SSR) and client-side rendering (CSR). I’ll also explain why you would want to use SSR over CSR, when they’re best used together and how they work together to build a website. By the end of this blog, you should understand how SSR works and why it’s worth using on your next project!
What is server-side rendering?
Server-side rendering (SSR) is a technique that allows your entire website to be rendered on the server. This can be done with an API and then React re-renders the content in a browser using HTML5 pushState and localStorage.
If you’re building a large web application, server-side rendering makes sense because it’s much faster than sending all of the data as JSON back down from your React app every time someone visits one of those pages. However, if you’re building something small or simple where most of what needs to happen is updating state variables within one page or even just changing some text across several pages at once—then client-side rendering might be more appropriate for you!
React-Helmet is a popular framework for using server-side rendering with react. This gives you full control over the title tag and meta tags, which are important for SEO. However, this also has drawbacks since not all browsers support pushState; therefore, if someone visits your website in an unsupported browser, they may see an error message instead of what they hoped would load up first.
What is client-side rendering?
Client-side rendering is the process by which your browser renders the page from the initial request. This means that any code you write and any data you provide will be shown to users as it would appear in their browsers.
This can be a useful feature for many reasons, including performance and single-page applications (SPAs). Client-side rendering allows websites to load much faster than their server-side counterparts because they only need to send requests to your web server once instead of multiple times each time a user hits refresh or clicks around on their screen.
Client-side rendering is the default for most modern web frameworks, including React and Angular. It can be used to create frequently updated information pages, such as weather forecasts or real-time statistics on news sites.
Why would I want to use SSR?
Performance: Client-side rendering is usually slower than server-side rendering. This is because whenever a page has to be retrieved from the server, it needs to be rendered on the client’s machine, which means that there are more steps involved in getting that data back to the browser.
Load time: SSR can improve load times by shortening them if you’re not using JavaScript or CSS pre-processors (like SASS) and aren’t using images too much.
SEO: It’s important for search engines like Google to know where your site is hosted so they can properly index it and understand what content you have available for users who might be looking for that information elsewhere online as well as where certain pages should be ranked within their SERPs (search results page). Server Side Rendering also helps with this process because it allows Googlebot to access directly REST API calls without any extra work being done by developers such as ourselves!
Security: You should always consider security when implementing any kind of technology but especially when dealing with sensitive data like credit card numbers etcetera. It’s important not only from an ethical standpoint but also from a legal one too since employees could easily misuse this type of information if left unsecured since no one knows exactly who exactly owns each website/business entity out there today anyway…
When should I use CSR?
CSR is ideal for:
Displaying static pages: When you want to display a static page, such as an About or Contact page, client-side rendering can make the user experience better. Static pages don’t require much time for rendering and can be cached quickly by the browser cache.
Quicker Indexing: Client-side rendered websites are indexed by search engines more quickly than server-rendered sites because they’re not considered “static” content like indexable images and JavaScript files are, which may reduce the number of queries sent to your site before it’s crawled by Google’s crawlers (the robots that index webpages).
Is it possible to use both SSR and CSR? (Spoiler alert: Yes, you can! And it’s not that hard.)
The answer is yes and no. You can use both server-side and client-side rendering in your React app, but it’s not that easy. There are some things you’ll want to do differently for each approach.
First, let’s talk about how SSR works with React applications: On the backend side, there’s a special file called index.html which contains HTML content (a web page) that gets rendered by Express Server when someone requests it from your website’s URL or by using another method such as CDN caching services like Cloudflare DNS or rsync/git remotes (e.g., https://github.com/davidnelson/react-component-config). Once this happens then, all subsequent requests will be served from this single file, so they don’t have any problems finding what they’re looking for because everything was already loaded into memory before being used by your application code running locally on client machines connected over USB cable ports; however, if there was something wrong with this process then
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Conclusion
I think it’s clear that server-side rendering is the future of the web. So much of what we do online is about keeping up with changing user needs and expectations, and server-side rendering makes it possible for us to always be one step ahead of our users.
\It’ll take some time for everyone to switch over completely from client-side rendering, though, so there will be some resistance at first. But if you think about how much simpler and more efficient your life would be if everything just worked all the time (and no more “Why can’t I find this page? And why is it so slow?), then eventually, I think most people will want server-side rendering too!
