How to get server-side rendering right
This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. The short answer to server-side rendering is that it is mostly a sequence of small decisions, not one big one.
The question is rarely whether something can be built, but what it costs to keep running afterwards. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
What it costs to ignore
Rendering on the server gets content in front of people sooner. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.
The steps
- Establish what you have today before changing anything
- Crawlers see finished HTML instead of an empty shell
- It adds infrastructure, so only pay for it when you need it
- Write down the decision so the next person does not re-litigate it
It adds infrastructure, so only pay for it when you need it. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.
A reasonable first step
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
- It adds infrastructure, so only pay for it when you need it — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.