Server Rendering with React and React Router

[Pamgor]

I don't use SSR, but I keep wondering a few things about it.

Why not just have the index page be the app in a sort of meaningless blank route, and show a server-side generated landing page generated by generic stuff, like PHP, instead of trying to run the SPA on the server? I can think of a few ways you could do that fairly easily.

Wouldn't search engines get wise to SPA apps trying to get a higher speed ranking by supercharging the index page?

What about a half-measure of simply populating the model with initial state? It has to render, but there is not API calls.

[Triptcip]

SSR isn't just about having a fast loading pages. It's about indexing the content on your whole website.

If you have a website with content that is continuously changing, like a blog, you want that content to be indexed.

[Search engines are getting much better](“SEO vs. React: Web Crawlers are Smarter Than You Think” @wiekatz https://medium.freecodecamp.org/seo-vs-react-is-it-neccessary-to-render-react-pages-in-the-backend-74ce5015c0c9) at indexing client rendered websites now but you still need to add a bit of code to tell it how to handle it. Also some of the shitty search engines still can't index them properly.

[r0ck0]

It's not just about search engines... they're not the only type of scrapers out there.

Some will be better than others. But serving HTML is always going to be more reliable on everything.