React and Vue.js are meant to build web apps, not websites | Hacker News Reader

React and Vue.js are meant to build web apps, not websites

2 pointsjanmo5 comments

A common mistake I see more and more people do is to build websites using React and Vue.js. These frameworks are meant to build web apps, they provide no advantage if you want to build a content website, worse they will kill all your SEO efforts. Having done a lot of SEO research in the past year, I came to the conclusion that search engines heavily penalize React and Vue.js websites even when they use server side rendering and I think they do this rightfully.

If I am looking for some kind of information, I want to have it right away, with spending as little bandwidth as possible and certainly I don't want to start a web app with over 1mb of javascript.

To summarize:

- Where React or Vue.js are a good choice: Web Apps that you don't want to be indexed by search engines. Such as SaaS tools or administration interfaces.

- Where you shouldn't use React or Vue.js: Content websites with little dynamic functionalities that you want to be indexed on search engines.

I have played with what feels like every framework rebuilding my personal site (which is still in the works). I looked at Gatsby, Next.js, etc. All of them felt like overkill for a simple site.

In the end I settled on a self created solution that takes markdown files (because I can write a blog post quick with it) that I upload to GitHub and then have netlify runs a build script on. This renders them using handlebar templates which the output is then deployed as pure static HTML. Google, users, etc are none the wiser. At first it was more of a "can I get this work" and in the end I found the time I save writing just markdown worth it. So many frameworks that I hear people using for even a simple personal site are absolute overkill.

And to me this still sounds a lot more complicated than using WordPress or, if you want to go full static, Jekyll.

What's the recommended tooling for the small dynamic aspects of a content website then?

Is there a better/modern equivalent to jQuery progressive enhancement?

I went for using no framework/library at all. Surprisingly I don't have the feeling that I am developing slower than with.

yeah, I've not found it impacts development speed particularly

though it does put the impetus on you to structure things well :)

I tend to not really emphasise speed of development these days, and more: speed of making an unanticipated change in 12 months when it's no longer fresh in my mind

For that I'd love to see something which had some of the structural benefits of React (et al) but with an emphasis on progressive enhancement... what that looks like I've no idea

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