Server-Side Rendering with React

React

Introduction

Server-side rendering (SSR) is a technique which allows the react applications to render on the server instead of a browser. This provides better performance and enhances user experience. Let’s go through the basic understanding of SSR, it’s benefits and many other details.

Understanding Server-Side Rendering

Server-side rendering is generating the HTML on the server and displaying it to the client, where javascript handles the interactions. Without SSR, there is client-side rendering where HTML is fetched by the browser itself and renders it.

Benefits of Server-Side Rendering

• Improved rendering speed: It does pre-rendering on the server and reduces the load time.
• Better SEO: Search engines gets better as they can easily rank and index the content in SSR application.
• Enhanced user experience: User gets the content faster and enhanced performance.
• Accessibility: Content is available to the users even if the javascript is disabled.
• Sharing on social media: It generates an accurate preview when sharing URLs on social media platforms.

Implementing Server-Side Rendering

• Setting up the server: Choose a server framework (like Express.js) to handle SSR request.
• React hydration: After the HTML is rendered on the server, the javascript make it interactive.
• Fetching data: Techniques like asynchronous data fetching or getInitialProps to get content before rendering.
• Handling routing: Arrange server routes to handle different URLs and routes.

Server-Side Rendering with Next.js

• Introduction to Next.js: For an introduction, Next.js is a popular framework for server-side rendering with react.
• Pages and routings: Create pages and define routes by using the file-based routing system.
• Fetching data: To fetch data, we can use useServerSideProps and useStaticProps .
• Styling and layout: Building styles and layouts for SSR applications.

Optimizing Performance in SSR Apps

• Caching: Cache improves the render time as the cache renders the pages and improves the loading time.
• ISR: ISR is Incremental Static Regeneration which generate and cache pages using dynamic data.
• Client-Side Navigation: The user experience is improved with client-side navigation after initial loading.

Conclusion

Server-side rendering can be a powerful tool for improving the performance and user experience of react applications. By rendering HTML on the server before sending it to the client, SSR can significantly reduce the time required to display a web page, resulting in faster load times and a better user experience.