Lesson 16 / 32

Prerendering & Server-Side Rendering

Two strategies for making JavaScript-heavy sites SEO-friendly.

Static prerendering

Prerendering means generating the full HTML for each page at build time (not request time). Every route has a complete .html file on disk. Google sees full content immediately. Best for static or slowly-changing content.

Server-side rendering

Server-side rendering (SSR) means the server renders HTML when a request arrives. The browser receives complete HTML with content already filled in. Google sees the final HTML immediately. Slower than prerendering but works for dynamic content.

Use Next.js or Nuxt

Modern frameworks like Next.js (React) and Nuxt (Vue) handle SSR and prerendering for you. They're designed with SEO in mind and make it easy to serve crawl-friendly HTML.