Take a look at reddit's new mobile site, written in react. It takes around 7 seconds to load, to display text and links. Compare that to HN's, which loads in 0.1 sec, for basically the same content.
SPA's have their place, for things like games or the likes of google maps. But for the rest, please respect the web paradigm . Your site will be simpler to build, faster and most importantly, lighter. The web world has become mobile-first, not js-centric...
While I agree that there are many situations where a straight port of a static site to a SPA doesn't give too much benefit, it sets them up to move to more advanced interactions moving forward.
The web, although maybe not originally intended, has become the most powerful software platform we have. Things are getting dramatically better and the rate of innovation isn't showing any signs of this slowing down. It is already amazing and it's going to get better.
Ok maybe it makes sense if you are building a game. Or something that needs to run offline. Or Facebook. But most web sites aren't like that.
The other day there was a Ask HN about what stack a CMS should be built in. Most people were recommending their favourite client-side JavaScript framework. I just don't get it...
Also I thought one of the advantages of using a js framework is that rendering can be done on the client? It sounds from this article that server rendering is more advantageous?
Also SEO was mentioned, but I thought javascript was taken into consideration by web crawlers?
Rendering on the server feels faster to the user. With client side rendering, you will often get a skeleton of the site that loads, and then the content that fills that skeleton 100ms or so apart from one another. This sounds like nothing, but it is perceptible to the user.
There are absolutely ways around this, but even the Big Guys get it wrong sometimes (for instance: facebook).
Server rendering has advantages when first loading the SPA from the server: better user experience - faster loading because you don't need to wait for AJAX calls to do their round trips between browser and server to get data to populate the page - and better SEO - you don't need to rely on the search engine to correctly render the whole page.
With state changes after the initial load, though, client rendering is much better for UX (responsiveness). The whole point of "universal javascript" is that you can get both (initial server rendering and subsequent client rendering) with the same code base.
One should be cognizant that one doesn't get benefits for free with the choice to go with universal JS.
It's still kind of crappy. So people end up building more complex solutions like this or using stuff like prerender.io to work around this issue. Just adds another layer of complexity to the already way to complicated stack of modern SPAs (in my opinion)
