Five mistakes teams make with server-side rendering

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit server-side rendering.

The question is rarely whether something can be built, but what it costs to keep running afterwards. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

The mistakes we see most

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Rendering on the server gets content in front of people sooner
• Crawlers see finished HTML instead of an empty shell
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

It adds infrastructure, so only pay for it when you need it. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

Making it stick

In practice

Most development decisions are really maintenance decisions wearing a different hat. 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

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.