I'm building a content-heavy marketing site. I've heard that Single Page Applications (SPAs) are bad for SEO because Googlebots struggle with JavaScript. Between React and Angular, which one has better built-in support for Server-Side Rendering (SSR)? Is Next.js for React superior to Angular Universal when it comes to indexing and page load speeds?
3 answers
Out of the box, both have challenges with SEO since they are SPAs. However, the ecosystem for React is currently ahead thanks to Next.js. Next.js makes SSR and Static Site Generation (SSG) incredibly easy, which is vital for SEO. Angular Universal is the equivalent for Angular, and while it works well, it's generally considered more complex to set up and maintain. If your primary goal is ranking on Google for a content-heavy site, a React/Next.js stack is often faster to deploy and has more community documentation specifically for SEO optimization.
Since Google's crawler is much better at rendering JS now, do we actually still need to worry about SSR for SEO, or is that becoming an outdated concern for modern web development?
Angular is catching up with "Hydration" improvements in recent versions, which makes the transition from server-rendered HTML to a live JS app much smoother and faster for the user.
Good point, Linda. The "Developer Experience" for SSR in Angular has improved massively in the last two years, making it a very viable choice for SEO-sensitive projects now
It’s not just about the crawler, William; it’s about "Core Web Vitals." A site using SSR or SSG sends a fully rendered HTML page to the user immediately, leading to a much faster First Contentful Paint (FCP). Google uses these speed metrics as a ranking factor. So, even if the crawler can read your JS, the delay in rendering the page will hurt your rankings. Plus, other platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter still struggle to scrape metadata from JS-only sites for link previews.