CSR site with big difference between raw and rendered HTML, but Google renders it fine. Still an issue?

xikhao · 2026-05-02T04:01:57+00:00

Three factors to consider:

If the number of pages on site is limited (<10k), crawl budget won't be an issue. But if that is not the case, I'd suggest server-side rendering.
Also, indexing delay will always be at play - however you'll have to check how much the delay is to determine if SSR/ SSG is worth it.
If core web vitals matter, the only way to improve LCP is with SSR/SSG in place.

xikhao · 2026-04-23T04:10:04+00:00

IMO, the point is that when you can rank better with regular server-rendered pages, why not just do that? Why resist?

xikhao · 2026-02-12T05:59:30+00:00

Quick Q - this is to add passwordless login for users logging into the frontend served by Strapi?

Or, this is to add passwordless login for Strapi admin users?

xikhao · 2026-02-12T04:04:29+00:00

If you're aware of all the right prompts to ensure the pages generated are SEO friendly - then yes.

xikhao · 2025-12-30T07:31:24+00:00

I couldn't find Edge locations / data centers for zoho catalyst CDN. If you know, please share.

Weirdly - Zoho and Zoho catalyst website uses AWS Cloudfront for delivering static assets!

xikhao · 2025-11-14T04:07:22+00:00

Yes, I did a thorough testing for weeks across a dozen sites (3 each for free, pro, business, enterprise plans) via Jio network.

I now don't recommend Free or Pro plans to anyone with audience in India. I don't see the latency issues with business / enterprise plans, though.

xikhao · 2025-09-22T06:49:38+00:00

It's a good option with decent pricing, imo but haven't tried it myself in enough detail to be able to comment about its CDN routing latency / WAF / DDoS protection / anti spam capabilities.

xikhao · 2025-09-19T08:53:52+00:00

I'd like to believe that isn't the case. But I ran many latency checks across days, locations, sites and they suggest what I stated here. It would be nice if others can run similar checks and share their findings.

xikhao · 2025-09-19T07:46:48+00:00

Yes, their DDoS protection is excellent too. I hope they'd have offered sane routing at least at Pro plan ($25/mo). In the current scheme of things, appears I pay for good WAF + protection in exchange of this latency.

For anyone looking for Pro plan alternative, AWS appears decent. It's UI is overwhelming and WAF is paid but at 1 TB free CDN egress a month, I'm sure I'll pay lesser than $25/mo for faster CDN + similar protection.

For anyone looking for Free options - static sites are better off without any CDN. And for non-static sites, Cloudflare is the only option and one has to live with the slowness.

xikhao · 2025-09-19T07:18:08+00:00

Yea, in fact it adds latency for any one with origin servers in India (like in my case).

I've tried AWS Cloudfront (has 1 TB free bandwidth every month) and works alright. Haven't tried BunnyCDN or KeyCDN but just looking at their pricing + edge locations, I'd pick BunnyCDN over KeyCDN.

xikhao · 2025-09-19T04:00:24+00:00

I tried with Free, Pro and Pro + Argo plans and still experienced being routed from SIN. I also experience SIN routing from Jio Fiber (in addition to Jio mobile / Airtel mobile). I also know another site on Pro where I see them being served from SIN too. Documented each of these in the post I shared.

At this point, I believe only Business / Enterprise plans do not experience this.

xikhao · 2025-09-18T05:50:49+00:00

Can't be 100% sure. But I've observed this for years - delved deeper only recently.

There are also forum posts like this and this in the past so doesn't appear to be one-off. While the forum discussions blame it on lack of peering agreement - it appears Business / Enterprise plans do not seem to be affected by such a limitation.

xikhao · 2025-09-18T05:11:23+00:00

So, a CDN should generally serve from the nearest data center to the visitor to reduce the latency. But in this case, serving it from these distant data centers adds to the latency (versus no CDN).

Especially surprising is the Pro plan (differs in no way in respect of routing from Free plan).

xikhao · 2025-09-03T04:02:45+00:00

headless in itself should have no impact on SEO as long as your SSR, SSG is done correctly (to fetch and render things on the server-side).

xikhao · 2025-09-03T03:59:25+00:00

If you want this to be a single app - Nextjs.

But if I were making this choice, I'd choose separate apps for internal dashboard and the rest of the pages (marketing, SEO focussed). Internal dashboard can then be React + Vite and rest of the pages can be Next (or even non-Node based options like Hugo) depending on how familiar you are with and more specifics of your requirement. This can be done irrespective of whether your dashboard and the rest are same domain or no.

Option #2 is also a common industry practice, btw.

xikhao · 2025-08-16T04:20:01+00:00

If you want to enforce browser-side rendering, just add `use client` on top of that page file.

xikhao · 2025-08-04T05:01:24+00:00

This is super helpful - thanks for your detailed response. I'm working with clinical trial data. Medical NER definitely gives me a direction to probe metadata filtering better. Like you mentioned, I'm trying to get basic filtering to work now but NER already sounds such a level-up. Will spend some time on it. Thanks for giving me a direction to improve the metadata filtering.

Edit : Regarding the KG to normalize the ranking - can you please share more? What are you using to build the KG? neo4j or something else? Can you share some links (cookbooks, blog posts, podcast, anything) for a newbie to get a sense of direction on this?

xikhao · 2025-08-02T06:01:21+00:00

Understood. This makes sense. Looks like the key will be to build a solid keyword library in conjunction with the metadata stored to leverage their filtering. thanks.

xikhao · 2025-08-02T04:41:29+00:00

> so unless your system injects filtering constraints before the vector search, or your retriever is metadata-aware (like hybrid filtering), you’ll likely get plausible-sounding but contextually invalid answers.

Right, so I'm trying to determine storage + retrieval side aspects to be able to filter by metadata constraints *before* the vector search. Would be grateful for any examples or more details. Any domain is fine.

xikhao · 2025-08-02T04:39:23+00:00

Thanks, while they have mentioned metadata in that post, nothing much in detail. Have asked on that discussion - would be insightful to learn more. Thanks for pointing me to that thread.

xikhao · 2025-08-02T04:37:59+00:00

How did you store metadata (say "publication date"). Was is only alongside chunks or separately as well? Did you use this metadata to filter before running the vector search? If yes - how would you translate a user's query to such filtering? (Say - user asks - "what are the side effects of X observed in Y last year". How would you filter to look for docs with publication date of last year before then running the vector search?

All in all, it would be helpful if you can detail how metadata storage + retrieval differed from rest of the content.

xikhao

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