Server side or client side rendering

Question

How to decide up front when building a web app between server side and client side rendering. Is there any general guideline or best practice for all websites? What should be recommended, server side rendering, client side rendering or a hybrid of two?

Some people say whether to choose client/server side rendering depends on the use case. I am still not sure what cases more suit client side versus server side rendering.

How do we decide up front whether to use a client rendered page or a server rendered page. Is there a middle ground on this?

Answer 1

there is no answer for all case scenarios :

• if you have lots of heavy business logic and you need the initial page to render fast , server rendering is faster and grants more performance ( see why twitter decided to move away from client rendering ) and How Basecamp Next got to be so damn fast without using much client-side UI

• if you are building an app that has lots of offline features, or fancy animations and page transitions client side rendering might be considered

• SEO is a major concern in client side rendering and crawlers will have trouble indexing the site

Answer 2

If you're using some modern front end SPA (single page app) frameworks like angular or ember, it's not yet so popular to render on the server side.

However, React.js does have a support for that: http://maketea.co.uk/2014/06/30/building-robust-web-apps-with-react-part-4.html

Ember.js guys are thinking on the problem as well, here's an interesting discussion: https://github.com/emberjs/ember.js/issues/9938

Hope it'll help a bit.