SSR best practices

Use when designing, implementing, or debugging server-side rendering for web applications.

Mental model

• SSR means the server returns meaningful HTML for the requested page before the browser runs the client application.
• SSR is a rendering strategy, not a product architecture by itself. You still need clear decisions about hydration, data fetching, caching, and client interactivity.
• Treat SSR and CSR as tools that can be combined deliberately rather than opposing camps.

When SSR helps

• Use SSR when first-load content, crawler visibility, or request-time personalization matters.
• Prefer SSR when the page should be meaningfully usable before client JavaScript finishes booting.
• Avoid request-time rendering when the page is mostly static and can be pre-rendered or cached more cheaply.

Data loading