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0 pointsevv12y ago0 comments

Personally, I hate and avoid the practice of building twice, once for SEO and once for usability.

I am always careful to build dynamic apps which render the HTML correctly on the server. Its handy not just for SEO. It also allows you to support legacy browsers and it dramatically decreases load times.

But if google is the only search engine you care about, and load times and legacy browsers don't matter to you, by all means, continue building one-page JS apps. There are often less headaches to be had when you go the simple route.

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edsykes12y ago· 1 in thread

do you mean that you serve the dynamic html from the server so that it appears static to clients, or that you render what happens on the client on the server if the googlebot is crawling?

evvOP12y ago

I've been using react on node.js to pre-render the entire site as it would appear with the dynamic client-side app.

Each app uses little wrapper libaries to agnostically behave the same way on client/server. Both the client and server environment have access to routing functions and cookies, using redirects and headers on the server and pushstate on the client.

These apps are much more cross-platform and quick because the app is visible as soon as the css loads. The app will mostly work before the client js launches, because all links are generated by the router and injected into the anchor href by react.

The idea is to have a genuine, working html & css site with a dynamic layer when the browser supports it.

Maybe I should start a blog on some of these topics..

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