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reactjsredux
Oliver Watkins
Oliver Watkins

Reputation: 13489

What is the point of server side rendering in React/Redux?

What is the point of server side rendering in React/Redux?

It would seem to me that another level of complexity is being added to the software, but I don't really see the benefit of it.

What are some common use cases for server side rendering?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 382

Answers (2)

Chris Lam
Chris Lam

Reputation: 3614

React's SSR (Server Side Rendering) offers some benefits over CSR (Client Side Rendering):

1. Improved (Perceived) performance at the client side

Obviously, rendered components are shown to the user right away without the need to wait for browser to render. The website won't be interactive until all React code are loaded and executed, but the perceived performance is improved by showing content to users ASAP.

2. Better SEO

Since content are rendered at the server side, search engine crawlers can see the rendered content instead of just a blank page with JS tags.

Note: Google crawler supports JavaScript rendering, not sure about other Search Engines though.

Interms of complexity - yes, SSR introduced extra complexity but there's always a tradeoff for each technical decision.

Upvotes: 2

Henrik Andersson
Henrik Andersson

Reputation: 47172

The whole point of so called Universal apps or "Isomorphic JavaScript" is its "write once, run everywhere" kind of motto. Meaning that you wouldn't need to maintain a specific backend project and a specific frontend project differing in techniques and instead consolidate a whole JavaScript project into one.

It's not quite as dandy as you'd think because you still need to maintain a backend specific part that handles the initial GET request.

Furthermore you also leverage the Single Page nature of an application whilst getting the server side first page load making your website 100% crawlable by the Googs, even though Google now crawls SPAs quite competently currently.

As for complexity - it could be as complex or as simple as you would want to, I guess. Not everything is solved by doing a "Universal app" nor is everything solved by doing a standard web app either.

Upvotes: 1

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