SSG fits well when you have a lot of static content; it is fast and improves loading time for static HTML files. Fine, so Static Rendering equals Static Site Generation (SSG), meaning that some html+css is created build-time. Lets take a look at a few pros and cons. You can find all of the code snippets in this article on GitHub. When we talk about server-side rendering, we are referring to this exact scenario. Next.js is using the terms Static and Dynamic to refer to SSG and SSR, respectively. It is the best when it comes to search engine optimization. An example would be a large e-commerce or social media platform. When you click the link to access the blog.html, the entire page will be rendered fresh with the new content. Regarding your Gatsby example, when using SSG, Gatsby builds static HTML pages for each of the pages it knows about, and includes the JS needed to hydrate the page into a single-page app with Gatsbys client-side routing configured. Static Site Generation (SSG) means building and rendering components and routes at build . Stored on a server and returned to the client when asked for, in an as is way. Lets get to it! In this case, Vue.js will take full control of this page. This component handles the layout of pages nested inside it. Server side rendering (SSR) and Static Site Generation (SSG) are two ways to create websites using a modern front-end stack (getting content from a server API) while preserving SEO friendliness and perceived performance. So, if you open this file and modify the JSX inside the Home function, it would be reflected in the browser. Once the initial load is over, accessing a different route or reloading the page will be super fast. However, its actually really cool! Hence server-side rendering can longer handle all this at once. Now, we want to do some stateful component magic alongside the static HTML we just built. What's not? Suppose you have a folder structure that looks like this: In the pages folder, add a new file and name it hello.js. . These techniques are Server-side rendering, Static site generation, and Incremental static regeneration. What is the pictured tool and what is its use? Following this, you can start up your apps server by running the following command: Your Gatsby application should be running on localhost:8000. When your site is experiencing an influx of users, it might result in connection errors. Often with a larger product, youll find that certain pages can indeed be statically rendered, while others are better off with server-side rendering. Client-side pros: Rich site interactions; Fast website rendering after the initial load. are: security, static content has nothing to attack outside the base web server, which is typically a very well tested off-the-shelf option; cost saving, typically one can host static files in S3 or Azure storage for 10% of the cost of a hosting a VM. 20062023. The greatest difference between a static site generator and a traditional web application stack, is that instead of waiting until a page is requested and then generating its . Fetch your content from any source in your Vue components, SSR ready. Some of the popular Static-Site Generator tools include Next.js, Gatsby, Jekyll, and Hugo, etc. If the page that gets generated contains dynamic sections, such as user specific content, it makes sense to use server-side rendering and re-generate the web page for each user (each request). Whenever the information to show changes (lets say you add a new blog post to your cool blog) then you must rebuild the project. Host it on a CDN (no expensive servers needed). Next.js is a hybrid React framework allowing you to choose your data fetching strategy on a per-page basis. This comes with the burden of high memory usage and high processing power on the server. BTW, we are launching tomorrow in beta!! Finally, weve exported the IndexPage function, which returns JSX containing our new link and some default content. You can send messages, transact, shop, and much more. Thanks for keeping DEV Community safe. What Are Static Site Generators? Server side rendering (SSR) and Static Site Generation (SSG) are two ways to create websites using a modern front-end stack (getting content from a server API) while preserving SEO friendliness and perceived performance. Refresh the page, check Medium 's site status, or find something interesting to read. They have prolonged initial load time. I strongly suspect you have either checked the public folder during development with SSR disabled, or in an earlier version of Gatsby that didn't support SSR in development. Its important to emphasize this: You can fetch any data from multiple sources (like products for an e-commerce website, blog posts etc.) The content is up to date because it is fetched on the go. The server serves up the static files (CSS and HTML) to the clients browser on the clients first request for the website. SSR Externals # Web forms are at the center of every meaningful interaction, so theyre worth getting a firm handle on. The pages are rendered during the build-up phase. Neat! The Stack Exchange reputation system: What's working? Now, if we open the browser, we should see our new link at the bottom of the page. You might be better off with static site generation. Moses is a full-stack web developer. Lets look at how to create a static site using these two generators. That's in contrast to client-side rendering, which uses the browser to create HTML using the DOM. Your application should be running on localhost:3000, and you should see this in the browser: The page that is being rendered can be found in pages/index.js. But starting with Gatsby 4, you can choose alternative rendering options in addition to static site generation (SSG) on a per-page basis. Because the JavaScript is rendered server-side, the users device has little bearing on the loading time of the page, making for better performance. Static Site Generation (SSG), also referred to as pre-rendering, is another popular technique for building fast websites. Two of these are Static Site Generation (SSG) and Server Side Rendering (SSR). In Static-Site Generator, the static pages are compiled at the build-time i.e, before deployment with some initial data. Ethernet speed at 2.5Gbps despite interface being 5Gbps and negotiated as such. When that is done, we can start our work on the application. It is great for Developers (content blocks created as React components) and for Content creators (visual editing experience). Here is what you can do to flag matfrana: matfrana consistently posts content that violates DEV Community's The initial page load is faster. Static rendering With static rendering, you'll need to generate a single HTML file for every page that the user can access ahead of time. Lately Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR) by Next.js offers a third way that's a sort of hybrid between the other two. Basically, the crawlers would see an empty web page. You still have to deploy the content to the CDN/server to see the updates. The browser is constantly making requests to the server for every new page, and each request. However, unlike CMS, the content is static, and templates load ahead of time. Most upvoted and relevant comments will be first, 30+ years of tech, retired from an identity intelligence company, job done! The server runs the React code on the server to generate the HTML/CSS. Fortunately, its clear that there are a few winners, namely React and Vue, which are incredibly popular. The content is rendered once upon every user request. It also contains two style tags, one for styling this page and the other for global styling of the app. The finished pages are then uploaded onto a server and are waiting for requests to fetch them. Client apps: Static web apps are commonly built using libraries and frameworks like Angular, React, Svelte, Vue, or Blazor where server-side rendering is not required. You cant use CDNs which help your app to load much faster (you. You certainly need to add blog posts to it. One of the best ways to build fast, interactive web sites and web apps is to utilize Static Site Generation instead of Server Side Rendering (known as SSR) or Client Side Rendering (known as Single Page Apps, or SPAs). Adam Kiss 398 Followers Full Stack Software Engineer who enjoys casual writing. - . Assume you have an imaginary server with an HTTP address test.com, and you are hosting the following index.html document as the main page. All of your pages are going to load super quickly because theyre already pre-cached, pre-generated, and pre-rendered. Platforms where you can host your static websites and are Jamstack pioneers, like Netlify and Vercel, make the integration between the headless CMS and your actual static website seamless. With the recent addition of server-side rendering and deferred rendering methods in many static site generators (SSGs), this has gotten even more complicated. A static site generator is a compromise between using a hand-coded static site and a full CMS. These generators pre-build HTML pages and make them available to the user ahead of time. Every page is rendered on the websites server independently. Every page is independent and is rendered independently. The . SSG happens in advance (and in an isolated context from requests, typically). Yet another buzzword, referring to a movement in technology and web development. Limited server-side rendering: Gatsby's use of pre-rendering means that it may not be the best choice for applications that require extensive server-side rendering. NextJS 9.3 Next-gen Static Site Generation (SSG) NextJS 3 . He also loves interacting with CMS, such as WordPress. I am baffled by the lack of concrete information about how Client-Side Rendering (CSR), Server-Side Rendering (SSR), and Static Site Generation (SSG) actually work. Server-side rendering was the only approach to load a .html page. Strong Conventions. Comparison with server-side systems. Server exposes few API's using which client. Personally I'm moving from Wordpress and MoinMoin to static sites with Hugo for these reasons. Modern-day tools let us do this extremely easily. There is no need to wait for server-side logic. Asking for help, clarification, or responding to other answers. This means that JavaScript content might be missed and not included during indexing, resulting in partial indexing and affecting the SEO. We imported a Layout component, which was added to the app by default. So-called front-end fatigue started to get real, with new libraries and frameworks all over the place. SPAs come with many challenges, one of which is search engine optimization (SEO). If the user navigated to /blog-post/2, for example, the server-side logic would plug the correct title, content, and author information into an HTML . Client Side Rendering (CSR) Server Side Rendering (SSR) Static Site Generation (SSG) If the content changes too quickly, it can be hard to keep up. I inspected the built public folder of a built Gatsby project and noticed that none of the React components were actually turned into html (regardless of whether they depended on user interaction). Gatsby had created an html file for each page, but the of each of those was still React components defined in JS, expecting to be turned into html by React on the client, run-time. SPAs). This approach is good if youre building a complex application that requires user interaction, that relies on a database, or whose content changes often. How to protect sql connection string in clientside application? Calling Next.js a static site generator is a bit misleading. That is, the content is rendered using JavaScript. With practical takeaways, live sessions, video recordings and a friendly Q&A. However, we would not use templating engines or server-side programming languages to generate the markup, wed use modern JavaScript libraries and frameworks, like React. They have nothing to configure and no environments to set up. Client-side rendering is different: The user would have to navigate to the page before the browser fetches data from the server, meaning that the user would have to wait for some seconds to pass before the browser is served with the content for that page. In this post, we will build a simple solution to transform our page created using React into a fully pre-generated set of static sites. Lets look at some advantages of static-generated sites. The advantage is that the pages are always up-to-date, but every page view triggers a call to the APIs. Vue's developer productivity combined with Nuxt's server side rendering, is the foundation for instant loading web sites that delight users and improve team velocity. The view is constructed on the client (browser) instead of server. Were also exporting a Home function that returns JSX containing our pages content. Client-side Rendering. I totally agree with you. Websites were pretty much static. After initial load time, the websites navigation will be super smooth and super fast, only having to make API calls to get the content dynamically. These frameworks include Angular, React, Vue.js, etc. Let your creativity and context drive your decisions. With Static Rendering, both Server and Client Components can be prerendered on the server at build time. The most common use case for server-side rendering is to handle the initial render when a user (or search engine crawler) first requests our app. With SSR, the page reloads, and visiting a new page has to hit a server request again. This process means that the initial load is prolonged. Check out this tutorial and learn how to use Next.js. How do unpopular policies arise in democracies? How does NextJS with SSG and client-side navigation work? The client requests data. Check memory usage of process which exits immediately. Then, dynamic rendering and templating engines happened. SSR sends a fully rendered page to the client; the clients JavaScript bundle takes over and enables the SPA framework to operate. With AWS tou can actually use CloudFront caching for dynamic serving content, it has TTL mechanisms to cope with it. Basically, a Static-Site Generator is a program or a tool used to generate static HTML websites and pages based on raw data and templates. Each blog post is an independent page and is fetched independently from the server. Basically, this movement encourages people to use static websites that dont use servers at all, making the hosting cheaper, and the application more resilient with no downtime. Next.js is a React framework that enables you to build static websites, server-side rendered applications, and the like. A content management tool is used to generate and manage web content and web pages. The feature allows you to update static content after you have already built your site. Are dynamic routes in Next.js rendered server-side or client-side? You need a server to run the rendering on this can get expensive. This means that the server makes no API calls to renders any HTML documents. Static-Site Generator automates the process of having to code HTML pages manually. Get the static build output from your favourite front end library, like React paired with Next.js or Gatsby. Faster page loads Server Side Rendering vs. Static Site Generation vs Client Side Rendering Today, websites are much like applications. Well start with a bit of history, then get into some real-world examples and technologies like Next.js and Gatsby. Pre-Rendering. The output is a bunch of static files, including the HTML file itself and assets like JavaScript and CSS. The website content is now visible. With Next.js, three types of rendering methods are available: Server-Side Rendering, Static Site Generation, and Client-Side Rendering. A static-site generator (SSG) is a software application that creates HTML pages from templates or components and a given content source. Since you call the APIs only at build time, you end up calling them fewer times in a day, so that, if you have a cap on the number of API calls, you dont risk to exceed it. Tips on front-end & UX, delivered weekly in your inbox. If you then click on Go to Home page. So, when should we use SSR and when should we use SSG? It doesnt go to the server. SSR allows page content to be focused and relevant to the social crawlers. Every HTTP request originating from the client would go through the application server. Husband and father of two. Lets go ahead and include that in the app.js. With Static Rendering, both Server and Client Components can be prerendered on the server at build time. React doesn't have to run on their computer. We recommend using Static Generation over Server-side Rendering for performance reasons. These generators pre-build HTML pages and make them available to the user ahead of time. Render a React element to its initial HTML. This increases the likelihood of poor user experience, and users can leave your site when they get frustrated waiting for the CSR to fully render the website. When the server receives the request, it renders the required component(s) into an HTML string, and then sends it as a response to the client. Static site generators are programs that dynamically generate all the webpages of a multi-page website including any relevant CSS or JavaScript so that they can be published in any number of places. I love React. Our goal was to improve the initial rendering performance. A rendering mode defines the stage at which your page's user-facing HTML is generated. Peer Review Contributions by: Peter Kayere. Thus, this makes it incredibly easier to use such hosting services and run statically generated pages with automated builds. Fetching data to render the pages at build time is an essential characteristic of a Jamstack site. Of course, with both of these approaches, client-side data fetching is still a thing. What do you do after your article has been published? As in the previous diagram, browsers send HTTP requests to the server, then the server processes the requests . "and frequently changing data (stock quantity) you may do an API call on component load to fetch an updated version of just the frequently changing data. You can use this method to generate HTML on the server and send the markup down on the initial request for faster page loads and to allow search engines to crawl your pages for SEO purposes. They are more secure when compared to dynamic websites. The server would send the browser an empty HTML and some data in JSON or XML via AJAX, and we would use our preferred library/framework to fill the pages up with meaningful tags and styles. They also include ISR (incremental static generation) in SSG because it works similarly, just delayed. The difference between this approach and client-side rendering (as in SPAs) is that the markup generation would not run on the clients device, but on our servers. NextJs is a framework to build a full-stack application with features such as server-side rendering using React framework. Features 100% React (and friends!) This is actually what differentiates between Server Side Rendering and Static Site Generation. A great use case of Client-Side Rendering is a single-page application (SPA). Founded by Vitaly Friedman and Sven Lennartz. A single-page app use-case will be if you want to create a website that will feel more like a mobile app. With modern technologies, static web pages can easily be rebuilt and redeployed when something changes. when you deploy or host the app on a CDN). Thats fine Next.js and similar technologies automatically statically render pages that need build time data (or no data at all) and server-side render pages that need per request data. This would be a great chance to catch up with the social Crawlers to target a high SEO ranking. Just press a button to add a blog post and voila, your static site is regenerated and ready to be accessed with brand new content. And if you click on Go to new page, it should take you to your newly added page. Over one million developers have registered already! After the initial request, the site behaves more like a Single-Page Application. The cached result is then sent to the client for hydration. Update the README.md file with the following: If you go back to the browser, the page should look like this: To add a new page to your VuePress website, add a new Markdown file to the root directory, and name it whatever you want the route to be. The pages are instantly ready to be displayed on the users browser. With a statically generated site, it is generated when you compile the project, making you get only static files with no server needed. The user makes a request to the server; the server processes the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on-demand and delivers a fully populated page to the users browser. Server-side-rendering has been a common pattern in web development for years. The JavaScript frameworks that supports client-side rendering development style includes React, Angular, and Vue.js. Easy. This means that developers who are familiar with React will find it easy to get started with Gatsby. The difference is that static rendering happens once at build time, while server rendering happens on-demand, as the user requests each file. This is what happens when the website is rendered on the client-side. There are really only two places React components are converted into HTML representations[^1]: the server, and the client/browser. This approach worked great at the time as most pages displayed plain text and images. Incremental Static Regeneration provides the benefits of Static Site Generation (SSG) and Server Side Rendering (SSR). It doesnt have to generate any HTML; it just serves it. Examples of static-site generators are Gatsby and VuePress. To create a Nuxt.js app, run the following command in your CLI: This will prompt you to select a name, along with some other options. The website loads quickly because the browser fetches content from the server before rendering it for the user. A hands-on guide for a Server-Side Rendering React 18 app Somnath Singh in JavaScript in Plain English Coding Won't Exist In 5 Years. Unfortunately, rendering the whole web page client side also brought a whole other set of potential problems. JavaScript intercepts these requests. Whenever a web crawler asked for our page, it would get it fully rendered no more client-side JavaScript execution needed for rendering. They both use the concept of templates to avoid writing, formatting, and coding the web pages manually. Cons It can become complex. The server will serve the page on demand every single time. I named mine demo-nuxt and selected the defaults for the other options. There are two main files here, the HTML mark-ups and the JavaScript file. Instead, Vue.js handles this in the browser. Hello, PHP and friends! The server only serves one single HTML document. Once unsuspended, matfrana will be able to comment and publish posts again. Lets take a simple example of CSR using Vue.js. These days we mainly use more modern technologies, like React, Vue and Angular. Were a bit more relaxed now, as most of the web crawlers and indexers are executing the JavaScript needed for client-side rendering. Take a look at a blog website. You build the React code. Because it is built on React, knowledge of React is required to use the framework. Exactly what html is created build-time depends on whether you use Client Components or Server Components. That's just what server-side rendering is! A website unique to a user with personal data, dashboard? Meet Adam Silvers Form Design Patterns, a practical guide to designing and building forms for the web. What do I look for? If you click the OnClick handlers, the linking and routing between different views and components are rendered in the browser instead of the server. In this talk, you'll learn more about CSR (Client. There are no backend to hack or databases or text boxes to inject malicious code into. With the SSR solution, rendering is conducted by the server. | by Prashant Ram | Medium 500.