Web development and performance
What is Server-side rendering?
Server-side rendering builds the HTML for a page on the server for each request, so the browser receives a complete document. It gives crawlers full content like static generation, while allowing the content to differ per request.
Also called: SSR
When it is the right choice
- Content that changes per user — accounts, baskets, personalised pricing
- Data that must be current to the second, such as live stock
- Very large catalogues where building every page at once is impractical
The costs
A server that must stay up, scale under load and be patched. Response time now sits between the visitor and the first byte, so caching strategy becomes a real engineering concern rather than a checkbox.
The common mistake
Choosing SSR for a site that is identical for everyone, because the framework defaults to it. That buys all of the operational cost and none of the benefit — static generation would produce the same HTML with nothing to run.
Where this is covered in depth
A definition can only go so far. JavaScript SEO: the difference between what you see and what gets indexed covers this properly — 3 minutes, free, no email required.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan. These definitions come from client work rather than from a content brief — where an entry describes a mistake, it is usually one found on a real site. More about how I work.