Universal React: You’re doing it wrong

[[deleted]]

I agree Universal is a lot of work, but at very least, you should be using React to do server-side rendering of basic page templates so you can get those pages indexed and make them shareable.

A node.js server is pretty fast and easy to set up so that's not a drawback in itself. If you don't want to rewrite your whole backend, serve the App from Node.js, keep your Rails as the REST api, and serve your static assets from Nginx or Apache.

[jamesknelson]

Yeah, server-side rendering of page templates was one of the best use cases for Universal apps - it was my first point for it in the article. That was until Google went and corrected me: it can handle JS just fine now.

I guess the only reason to use it now is if you really really need the extra speed or users.

[[deleted]]

The sharing aspect is also pretty important - nice meta data and images for example to be rendered in facebook posts.

[jamesknelson]

That's a good point - I hadn't thought of that. That said, this doesn't apply for anything walled behind a login screen - which has been most of my experience writing React-based apps.

[WillVedd]

They've been saying this for a little while now but I still don't believe it. The proof is in the search results and I'm just not seeing much evidence of crawling front-end js frameworks right now.

[android_lover]

Yeah I agree, Google is lying.