[scraplab]

By using client side rendering you’re effectively playing SEO on hard mode. It’s all possible, but you’re making life very difficult for yourself.

Google will crawl and render client side only sites, but the crawl budget will be reduced.

The bigger factor is that Google cares a lot about long clicks - clicks on results which don’t immediately produce another search or a return to the results page. Client side rendered sites almost always perform worse from the POV of the user and therefore convert at a lower rate.

And now Web Vitals includes things like Largest Contentful Paint and Interaction to Next Paint, you’re going to find it much harder to bring these metrics under the target thresholds.

If you want to perform well in search, make things easy for yourself: use mostly SSR HTML and CSS and some sprinkles of JS on top.

[graemep]

"Client side rendered sites almost always perform worse from the POV of the user and therefore convert at a lower rate."

I assume that people who create client side rendered sites disagree. Surely no one wants to make user performance worse, and I struggle to see advantages sufficient to offset that.

[gryzzly]

Generally very few people care, unless it’s "an impact metric" tied to that team. Or there is a "performance sprint" or something. "DX" has been more important than "UX" in the current mainstream JS community for a while. To give an example: babel, that enabled syntactic sugar, also caused many versions of runtime implementations of various ES6+ syntax to end up in bundles, or polyfills for browsers the clients aren’t actually using etc.

You can read more about the things that are absolutely mainstream and are problems in very popular libraries in the "Speeding Up JavaScript" series from Marvin Hagemeister – like this one https://marvinh.dev/blog/speeding-up-javascript-ecosystem-pa...

Also, most devs are testing on powerful devices, and there is a big disconnect between their experiences and that of their users – https://infrequently.org/2021/03/the-performance-inequality-...

[j45]

Either way, more work to generate the same HTML/CSS in the end creates a longer experience, one that's too often more brittle in the long run.

Where SEO is involved, simplest wins. There's a reason why Wordpress focused on making words easy to publish, organize, and connect, and from there try to be a CMS.

[0x457]

I think it's more about that SEO as less important for those people.