Introduction
The landscape of web development has undergone a dramatic shift over the past decade. Single Page Applications (SPAs) dominated the 2010s, promising rich, app-like experiences in the browser. But today, we’re witnessing a renaissance of Server-Side Rendering (SSR). This isn’t a step backward—it’s an evolution that combines the best of both worlds.
The SPA benefits
When SPAs emerged, they solved real problems. Traditional multi-page applications required full page reloads for every navigation, creating jarring user experiences. SPAs offered:
- Instant navigation between views without page refreshes
- Rich interactivity with complex UI components
- Reduced server load by moving rendering to the client
- Clear separation between frontend and backend APIs
The Cons of SPA:
However, as SPAs matured, their limitations became increasingly apparent:
1. Performance Issues:
- The bigger the application, the larger the JavaScript bundle, which delays initial page loads.
- Users see blank screens while JavaScript downloads and executes.
- Poor performance on mobile devices, especially with slow internet connections.
2. Developer Complexity:
- State management became increasingly complex.
- Data dependencies created sequential bottlenecks: for example, initial rendering might depend on the logged-in user’s profile, which requires additional data that depends on other data. This creates a waterfall effect where the system waits for a sequence of multiple API calls to complete before showing content.
- Bundle size optimization became a constant battle.
3. SEO Challenges:
- Search engines struggled with client-rendered content.
- Meta tags and Open Graph data couldn’t be dynamically set for social sharing.
- Workarounds like prerendering added complexity.
Server Side Rendering SSR
Modern SSR isn’t the PHP or Rails-style server rendering of the past. It’s a hybrid approach that renders React, Vue, or other framework components on the server, sends fully-formed HTML to the client, and then “hydrates” that HTML to make it interactive.
On the client side, SPA frameworks like React and Vue are still used. User interactions and application state changes still occur on the client side. Even navigation can still happen on the client side without needing to return to the server for every page.
The key difference is in the initial rendering of the application. After that first render, you can choose what runs on the client or server through routing configuration.
In simple words: It is a hybrid approach., and it combines the best of the two worlds.
Why SSR Is Rising?
The shift to SSR is driven by tangible benefits that directly impact business metrics:
1. Performance Wins:
- Faster First Contentful Paint (FCP)
- Improved Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
- Content visible before JavaScript loads
- Better Core Web Vitals scores
2. Mobile devices:
The final JavaScript bundle is smaller, and most rendering happens on the server, which makes it faster for less powerful mobile devices. Since the initial rendering happens immediately on the server, it provides a better experience on slow connections.
3. Developer Experience:
- Simplified data fetching with server components: for example, if you need the logged-in user’s profile and other related data, you can retrieve them all at once on the server and send the complete result to the client, eliminating data fetching waterfalls.
- Better integration between backend and frontend.
- Built-in routing and code splitting.
4. SEO & Discoverability:
- Search engines receive fully-rendered HTML.
- Dynamic meta tags work correctly.
- Social media previews display properly.
- No special configuration needed.
Extra technical details for consideration:
Switch to SPA is easy:
As we said that the new SSR can by a hybrid approach where we combine both worlds SSR and SPA. And in fact most famous SSR frameworks like Next.js and Nuxt.js support an option to generate SPA only production version.
If you chose a hybrid approach, then you can control what routes are served from client side, or server side from the configuration of routing.
Dockerization and SSR:
SSR requires hosting and serving from a web server, which means you need either to serve it from the same server that hosts your API services, or you need a separate web server.
This was actually a big selling point for SPAs—you could host them on blob storage like AWS S3 or Azure Blob Storage.
However, with the rise of containerization and Docker, it’s incredibly easy now to spin up a new web server and deploy it to a container service. The operational overhead that once made SSR prohibitive is now minimal.
Front-End dedicated web server can do a lot.
Having a dedicated web server that serves your front-end unlocks tons of additional features, like image optimization, font optimization, and static file caching. Modern frameworks like Next.js, Nuxt, and Remix come with these optimizations built-in, giving you performance improvements without extra configuration.
Security, Security, Security:
Hosting SPAs on the client side forces developers to take extra steps to communicate and authenticate securely without exposing secrets on the client side. Every API key, configuration value, and authentication token must be carefully managed to avoid leaking sensitive information in the JavaScript bundle.
With a dedicated server handling SSR, you can store secrets server-side where they belong. This cuts down the complexity of secure client-server communication. You can:
- Keep API keys and secrets on the server, never exposing them to the client
- Implement authentication middleware that validates users before rendering pages
- Set security headers like Content-Security-Policy, X-Frame-Options, and HSTS
- Control access to routes and data at the server level
The security posture of SSR applications is fundamentally stronger because you have a trusted server layer between your users and your backend services.