The main advantage of server-side rendering of client-side templates is cutting your initial load time to a bare minimum (not having to wait for scripts to load/compile, taking advantage of page caching, etc.). However, this usually only matters when you're afraid of users getting impatient and bouncing, which tends to be true of sites that mainly display content and don't have a ton of interactivity, and sites like…
A big one for the need of server side rendering is SEO. Without server side rendering, most web crawlers don't have access to your content and you can't rank for SEO.
The main advantage of server-side rendering of client-side templates is cutting your initial load time to a bare minimum (not having to wait for scripts to load/compile, taking advantage of page caching, etc.). However, this usually only matters when you're afraid of users getting impatient and bouncing, which tends to be true of sites that mainly display content and don't have a ton of interactivity, and sites like…
It feels so much faster tho, to not have websites slow down when my browser slows down. Server side rendering should be considered a better experience for the end user, especially if it can prefretch the next pages.
The main advantage of server-side rendering of client-side templates is cutting your initial load time to a bare minimum (not having to wait for scripts to load/compile, taking advantage of page caching, etc.). However, this usually only matters when you're afraid of users getting impatient and bouncing, which tends to be true of sites that mainly display content and don't have a ton of interactivity, and sites like…
A big one for the need of server side rendering is SEO. Without server side rendering, most web crawlers don't have access to your content and you can't rank for SEO.
Given the prevalence of client-side rendering, I think all the major players have learned to circumvent this. They can run a full headless browser instead of just looking at the raw HTML, and detect when the JavaScript seems to have rendered the content.
That said, user experience (in this case site speed) can be a factor in how Google actually ranks pages, so that could be another motivation.
A big one for the need of server side rendering is SEO. Without server side rendering, most web crawlers don't have access to your content and you can't rank for SEO.
Given the prevalence of client-side rendering, I think all the major players have learned to circumvent this. They can run a full headless browser instead of just looking at the raw HTML, and detect when the JavaScript seems to have rendered the content. That said, user experience (in this case site speed) can be a factor in how Google actually ranks pages, so that could be another motivation.
Well... as everything else with how Google's crawler and algorithms work, there are no official or definitive answer, but what has been communicated is that it could work but definitely more difficult and can lead to more issues.
Knowing a bit about SEO, if you want to invest in your ranking, I wouldn't go without server-side rendering.
Phoenix.LiveView — you can't ignore it, the coolest thing happening right now about server-side rendering. Demo: https://youtu.be/Z2DU0qLfPIY?t=2628 Links: https://leveljournal.com/why-phoenix-liveview-is-a-big-deal https://elixirforum.com/t/phoenix-liveview-info/16569 PS please stop calling it isomorphic — this is disgrace for the mathematics.
I've started to play around with LiveView by migrating something from ajax to it [0] and it seems very nice! It's still in beta tho and a lot to do still... but very promising indeed :)
Given the prevalence of client-side rendering, I think all the major players have learned to circumvent this. They can run a full headless browser instead of just looking at the raw HTML, and detect when the JavaScript seems to have rendered the content. That said, user experience (in this case site speed) can be a factor in how Google actually ranks pages, so that could be another motivation.
Well... as everything else with how Google's crawler and algorithms work, there are no official or definitive answer, but what has been communicated is that it could work but definitely more difficult and can lead to more issues. Knowing a bit about SEO, if you want to invest in your ranking, I wouldn't go without server-side rendering.
Still, the two buckets I described above hold true. If someone is returning to your web app - Slack, or Trello, for example - you don't care as much about SEO because most of your visitors are return visitors. Your splash page, on the other hand, needs to be optimized for SEO but won't have much interactive complexity, so it doesn't need client-side rendering.
I believe a significant motivation of SSR was to be indexed by Google, then Google said they will start crawling JS rendered pages: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/05/understanding-web-... So maybe that took the wind out of the sails.
Beware tho, Google has still not officially said it was able to parse SPAs as well as server-side rendered pages and have still at multiple occasion (and still recently) said that although it can deal with JS, its not perfect and leads to issues. So if SEO is important I wouldn't skip SSR.
Phoenix.LiveView — you can't ignore it, the coolest thing happening right now about server-side rendering. Demo: https://youtu.be/Z2DU0qLfPIY?t=2628 Links: https://leveljournal.com/why-phoenix-liveview-is-a-big-deal https://elixirforum.com/t/phoenix-liveview-info/16569 PS please stop calling it isomorphic — this is disgrace for the mathematics.
also, from a selfish programmer standpoint, programming in elixir is really such a joy.
A big one for the need of server side rendering is SEO. Without server side rendering, most web crawlers don't have access to your content and you can't rank for SEO.
Given the prevalence of client-side rendering, I think all the major players have learned to circumvent this. They can run a full headless browser instead of just looking at the raw HTML, and detect when the JavaScript seems to have rendered the content. That said, user experience (in this case site speed) can be a factor in how Google actually ranks pages, so that could be another motivation.
Yeh they use a two stage process now but client side is still best - look at the recent JavaScript series on googles webmaster chanel.