DEV Community

Itamar Tati
Itamar Tati

Posted on

1

What Is Server-Side Rendering (SSR) in Web Development?

Server-Side Rendering (SSR) is a technique where the server generates the complete HTML for a webpage and sends it to the browser.


How it works:

  1. Initial Request: When you visit an SSR site, the server processes the request and renders the HTML with all the necessary content.
  2. Complete Page: The browser receives the fully-rendered page, so users see the content almost immediately.
  3. Interactivity: Once the page is loaded, JavaScript takes over to enable interactivity.

Pros:

βœ… Faster initial load since the browser gets a pre-rendered page.

βœ… Better for SEO since search engines can easily crawl the content.


Cons:

❌ Can increase server load as rendering happens on the server for every request.

❌ Slower interactivity if the JavaScript takes time to load.

Frameworks like Next.js and Nuxt.js leverage SSR for performance and SEO benefits. SSR is especially useful for content-heavy or SEO-focused applications.

In short: SSR delivers fully-rendered pages quickly, making it ideal for SEO and user-first experiences! πŸš€

Heroku

Simplify your DevOps and maximize your time.

Since 2007, Heroku has been the go-to platform for developers as it monitors uptime, performance, and infrastructure concerns, allowing you to focus on writing code.

Learn More

Top comments (0)

A Workflow Copilot. Tailored to You.

Pieces.app image

Our desktop app, with its intelligent copilot, streamlines coding by generating snippets, extracting code from screenshots, and accelerating problem-solving.

Read the docs