What to ask your agency about server-side rendering
The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on server-side rendering, these questions are worth asking early.
Code gets read far more often than it gets written, and usually by someone with less context than the author had. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.
Questions worth asking
- Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
- How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
- What happens if it needs changing in a year?
- What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?
What a good answer sounds like
Rendering on the server gets content in front of people sooner. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.
It adds infrastructure, so only pay for it when you need it. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.
What this looks like day to day
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
- 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
If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.