SSR (Server-Side Rendering)

With SSR, the server runs your framework (React, Vue, etc.) on each request and returns fully formed HTML. Compared with client-side rendering, the big difference is that the very first response a crawler sees already contains the actual content.

Two reasons SSR is having a moment again: it tends to improve Core Web Vitals like LCP for free, and AI search puts pressure on 'content must be readable without executing JS'. That is why frameworks like Next.js, Nuxt and Remix lean on SSR as a default mode.

It is not a silver bullet, though. A poor caching strategy can blow up server load, and per-user dynamic content makes infra costs grow quickly. Most teams mix SSR with static generation (SSG) and ISR, picking the right render mode page type by page type.