SSR vs SSG vs ISR vs CSR – What’s the Difference?

Ahmed Nail Al Drabea — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 08:53:37 +0000

If you’re building for the web, understanding how pages are rendered can make or break your app’s performance! Here’s a quick & simple breakdown of the four major rendering strategies:

SSR (Server-Side Rendering)

The page is generated on the server for every request and sent as HTML.
Great for dynamic data & SEO (e.g., dashboards, user profiles).
Can be slower since it waits for the server on every request.

SSG (Static Site Generation)

The page is pre-built at deploy time and served as static HTML.
Blazing fast & great for SEO (e.g., blogs, landing pages).
Data is fixed until the site is rebuilt.

ISR (Incremental Static Regeneration)

Hybrid approach: Pre-build pages like SSG but regenerate them in the background when needed.
Best of both worlds: Fast, SEO-friendly, and supports dynamic updates (e.g., product listings, news sites).
Requires defining a revalidation time.
CSR (Client-Side Rendering)
The browser loads a barebones HTML and fetches data via JavaScript.
Ideal for single-page apps (SPAs) with a smooth user experience.
Bad for SEO if not handled properly.

Recommendations:
Try to use ISR [ Incremental Side Regeneration ] :

because it will provide a dynamic way to handle data after each change without giving a full rebuild for all of the project pages, which will just re-render the component or page after each change.

DEV Community: Ahmed Nail Al Drabea

SSR vs SSG vs ISR vs CSR – What’s the Difference?