JavaScript and E-Commerce website.

Lately, I have seen websites adopting only JS approach. Well, good for me, thats what I do! but NO.

Do users care about that? NO!

Do SEO care about that? May be!

Do Crawlers (like WebArchieve) care? YES!

In my opinion websites like Facebook, Netflix, WhatsApp-Web etc. which don’t care about SEO or have user-specific content are good candidates for SPA (Single page App). Not an E-Commerce or Content-heavy website!

Let me stress more on E-Commerce here, Is this a good business decision to have your E-Commerce website completely relying on JS? Potentially making it least crawl-able by most bots among Search-engines or webarchieve OR is not at all usable with JS disabled.

A counter argument would be, hey but these days Google-bot parses JS content. I had say, I would not just rely on others implementation, Google might be doing that, but not all other Search Engines.

Let’s take a real life example: Flipkart.com. when I lived in India, it was one of my favourite website . Lately while browsing, I felt its slow (More white screens), but for my surprise, they completely re-wrote the whole desktop website in JS. Made sense to do that on mobile (btw I love their mobile-web), but I am not sure for desktop.

Noticeable white space blocks below navigation (no content.)

Site loads and renders at once. (no waiting for content.) — Amazon.in is competitor of Flipkart in India

Lets see what goes in Search results for same queries.

I searched for “buy smartphone india”

Among top 5, Amazon takes 2 places. Also, coz Flipkart results are not crawl-able, you don’t see “Results 1-x of y” in byline.

Also Google cached version for Amazon and Flipkart didn’t surprise me.

Source Google cached copy of Flipkart result.

Source Google cached copy of Amazon for same query.

And the same is for webArchive of Flipkart

WebArchive copy of Flipkart for Aug-2015

WebArchive copy of Flipkart as of Dec-2016 blank! of-course!