When server-side rendering is worth the effort

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. Server-side rendering is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Most development decisions are really maintenance decisions wearing a different hat. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

When it is worth it

Rendering on the server gets content in front of people sooner. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not.

How to decide

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. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

What this looks like day to day

The question is rarely whether something can be built, but what it costs to keep running afterwards. 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

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.