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What is server-side rendering?

Updated: Jul 23, 2020



Introduction


Whenever a web page is requested, the fully generated page should be returned to the user with fast response time. In response to a user’s HTTP call, an HTML page is received as the result of the browser. But this became futile with the boom of the web applications generated by JavaScript.


Let's say we have a typical PHP website where we try to retrieve data from the database. With the old server-side rendering solutions, the server compiles everything and delivers a fully rendered HTML page to the viewer which is fast. But each time the viewer navigates to another route, the server has to do the work all over again which increases the page load time and some web crawlers are unable to index the site.user


Let us explore in this article about how SSR comes in to deliver faster responsive JavaScript sites.


What is server-side rendering?


Server-Side Rendering (SSR) - SSR is the ability of a JavaScript application to render on the server-side rather than in the browser. SSR is a process of taking a client-side JavaScript framework website and rendering to static HTML and CSS on the server. SSR helps in the faster website rendering(Fast First Render).


The browser first receives HTML documents like images, CSS, and JavaScript and collects them. Then parses and downloads these documents. So with just HTML and CSS files the browser can render the page and does it very fast and while the JavaScript files are getting downloaded in the background.


The Server-side sends a fully rendered HTML page to the client and while the client’s JavaScript bundle takes over and allows the SPA framework to operate and have quick development time for subsequent navigation.


Advantages of SSR

  • Performance

adding a webpage’s content into Google. It allows your site to have a faster first page load time, which is the key to good user experience means there is no need for the initial load.

  • SEO

Search engines cannot efficiently and correctly add a webpage content into it (Indexing) that can exclusively render the client-side, despite the latest improvement to indexing the search engines. Google favors sites with fast load times. Google crawls web apps built with JavaScript, so it is better to have server-side rendered content ready for Google and other search engines to crawl your site. So with SSR, you get the benefits of traditional websites SEO since the entire page can now be crawled by bots.



  • Social Media Optimization -