Server-side rendering: what to get right first

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. If you only fix one thing about server-side rendering this quarter, make it the first item below.

The question is rarely whether something can be built, but what it costs to keep running afterwards. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Start here

Rendering on the server gets content in front of people sooner. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

Then this

Crawlers see finished HTML instead of an empty shell. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Eventually

It adds infrastructure, so only pay for it when you need it. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

The short version

Code gets read far more often than it gets written, and usually by someone with less context than the author had. Three things worth confirming about server-side rendering before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Crawlers see finished HTML instead of an empty shell — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.