You wanted to provide the best of both worlds. You wanted a Single Page Application (SPA), built using a modern framework such as Angular with its incredibly dynamic rendering, scalable component based architecture, incredible tooling and Progressive Web App (PWA) capabilities.

BUT you also wanted quality Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), which you realise is heavily dependent on the ability for search engines and their bots to crawl and index your site. HOWEVER, despite claims that AJAX crawlers and their javascript rendering capabilities are getting better, your dynamically inserted <meta> tags just don’t appear on social cards and a preview of a google fetch or $ curl https://yoursitehere.com tells you that you actually haven’t got a site that you swear you have spent the last year developing.

In addition, you realised that displaying content quickly is critical for user engagement and wanted to take your chrome lighthouse scores to the next level.

Server Side Rendering is a viable solution to many of your SEO & performance related problems. However, it is important to understand the changes you’ll need to make in advance to save you a lot of trouble wondering why everything works fine… until you get on the server (or even worse; deploy)