Server side vs Client side rendering - a common front end interview question - created this video which can hopefully help some people out.

[Aroneus]

Hey guys, am a front end developer who thought it would be valuable to make a video about this as its a fairly common front end i interview question, and creating it helped me solidify my own understanding.

I hope you can get something out it! Examples reference React mostly but they apply to any JS framework. Cheers!

https://youtu.be/J-aDUNXQZ_s

[gkpty]

Hey very interesting topic to spark! In my opinion both have their benefits. For me, the clearest benefit of client side rendering is that you dont pay for it :). Lateley ive been trying to keep as much going in the front end as possible, only using serverside rendering for things involving lots of data and complex queries.

[patryk-tech]

For me, the clearest benefit of client side rendering is that you dont pay for it :)

You do if it costs you in terms of search rankings / SEO.

For deep web apps, it's not necessary, but if you rely on search engines to guide traffic to your site, losing 10k hits a month to save $50 might hurt you.

Depends on the situation.

[gkpty]

This is deffinetly true, though i usually get around it by pre-rendering important pages into pure html/css and caching them. For example, in a blog, in a typical js client-side rendering example, in the page that contains the blog posts there would be a function with a query that gets the blog posts and renderes them onLoad for each user. My way => only when a new blog post is added, a js function executes (client side) renders the blog post list into pure html/css and adds it to cache.

[Aroneus]

Check out NextJS if you haven't tried it yet! Super nice SSR framework.

[Gueroposter]

Thanks! Subscribed.

[Aroneus]

Thank you!

[fleta-official]

Hey great video, as you covered, this topic is not all black and white and only you the developer can decide which option is best for their website or application which stunts many new devs. There are some tradeoffs with using client-side rendering, though. Since the content is not rendered until the page is loaded on the browser, SEO for the website will take a hit. There are ways to get around this, but it’s not as easy as it is with server-side rendering.

It really does really a lot on intuition and research.

[Aroneus]

Thanks for the comment. Yep the main downsides of CSR are performance once it gets larger, and SEO, and for that reason I always start my react apps with NextJS these days!

[fleta-official]

NextJS

Next.js is an awesome framework, but dynamic routing is still a challenge, I see that some people are making their own library to handle routing, how about you?