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Comment by anonymousDan | Hacker News Reader

Is SSR still much better for seo?

Yeah, big time. It's faster, so crawlers give you better scores for page speed, which is important. Secondly, it automatically renders all of your content, vs if you dynamically load content, the crawler may just see a page with a "Loading" element and never actually view the content itself.

Google argues that it is able to handle javascript heavy client side code in it's crawlers, but the data seems to show otherwise.

Perhaps the best method is a mix of static or SSR content for the content-heavy stuff that you want indexed and SPAs for the truly dynamic experiences. This is easier said than done but there’s a good chance your marketing team is separated from “product” anyway. Marketing can continue to use WordPress or some other CMS with a static export or SSR and product gets the full app experience stuff.

It’s mentioned in other threads that SSR is more expensive as your scale - so you might as well make the “outside” layer of your site light weight and static/SSR for fast client loading and then give them the full SPA once they’ve clicked through your landing pages.

Yes. There's a separate queue for sites that need js rendering and it eats much more into your crawl budget. Best way to avoid it imo is to use something like Rendertron, which is made and recommended by Google.

https://github.com/GoogleChrome/rendertron appears to be deprecated and no longer recommended by Google. They are now recommended basically what this article is about.

Rendertron is deprecated
Please note that this project is deprecated. Dynamic rendering is not a recommended approach and there are better approaches to rendering on the web.

Rendertron will not be actively maintained at this point.

https://github.com/GoogleChrome/rendertron

I think a lot of content that you would want to SEO you are better off with static sites anyway.

If we are comparing complex SPAs then it's not really relevant

Not if the html actually has content instead of just being a sad blank page with a magic div entrypoint.

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