The Drawback of Client Side Rendering

Client side rendering is cool until you want to do something that it can't do...
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[@navneethsubramanya.8465]

Ben's got 99 problems, but a girlfriend ain't one.

[@phantomKE]

Bruh! He says it with a straight face

[@navneethsubramanya.8465]

@@phantomKE I know right? He just leveled up with these jokes!

[@abdulazizs824]

🤣🤣

[@blipojones2114]

jokes aside, he's not a bad looking dude at all, getting jacked wouldn't hurt tho, as long as he doesn't covert to a life coach and talk about it non-stop like that other coder youtuber John Sonmez.

[@malvoliosf]

He has a girlfriend in Canada.

[@willmakk]

Your metaphors are next level.

[@keith6293]

here's your big mac.

[@arturfil]

Aaaah I see what you did there...

[@dickheadrecs]

🎈 🏠 🎈

[@alexcc316]

"you are not a karen"

[@programming2249]

I avoid client-side rendering in order to save CPU cycles for cryptocurrency mining.

[@r0ckinfirepower]

hahaha

[@TechdubberStudios]

hilarious comment! but crypto mining is an inefficient form of revenue on client's computer, see TPB case experiment.

[@ezshroom]

@@TechdubberStudios It may pay less than ads, but it's many times better. I support websites that responsibly use cryptomining, and I block ads. Please, don't say that ads are better. They have never been any good to anybody's web browsing experience. Oh, and you can use cryptomining along with Arc, another earning method that does not involve ads. I'm done with Google's creepy trackers. Cryptocurrency mining is the future.

[@TechdubberStudios]

@@ezshroom I am genuinely 100% with you on the crypto movement. I hate ads. Always have hated them. But there are at least 2....3 big corporations that come to mind that were built on the ads business model, but with crypto mining... can't find one. And browser-crypto-mining is not exactly a new technology. I really want it to replace ads. I really do. Hate the pop-ups, spying, tracking, that's going on. And the first corpo that comes to mind would be Netflix, when considering whom should adopt the crypto model. Because the users stay on netflix and binge-watch hours and hours!

[@TechdubberStudios]

@@ezshroom also, do you happen to know any website/forum/subreddit focusing on browser-based mining? I would really like to join and dig in more into this subject.

[@shaftsbury120]

Fantastic job explaining this! As always, the hilarious dry humor and "next level" metaphors help drive home points and keep things entertaining. Really helped clear up a bunch of stuff and get me pointed in the right direction. Many thanks!

[@evans8245]

solutions: 0) pre-rendering with parcel or webpack 1) server side rendering

[@archmad]

your solutions are not client side rendering. he mentioned it.

[@CarlosMartinezTech]

I like how you explain, well done. Thank you for the quality content.

[@dawid_dahl]

This channel is slowly becoming one of my favorites on KZbin! 😄

[@tonylion2680]

I´ve been watching your videos and yes, the quality of the content is always awesome, new suscriber

[@Silver_Knee]

I avoided serverside rendering a meta tag by registering a sub-domain, doing the serverside-rendering there and making my app only compatible with a set number of user-agents. Brilliant!

[@diegogimbernat9253]

I love the tint on your glasses, it's serial killer-ish, where can i get a pair like those?

[@bawad]

a package arrives at your door after the 3rd kill

[@fev4]

@@bawad respect

[@-Jakob-]

They are the left-behinds after each kill. That's the way you get it.

[@johnnamtae9610]

@@bawad quick scope no scopes?

[@flamendless]

Those tints are wiped off blood from killing

[@samsonbrody6308]

Great video. Trying to wrap my head around server side rendering and this video definitely helped

[@0dyss3us51]

You are hilarious and informative my dude haha, relatable. And damn dude the lenght of your link

[@gelismissuriyeli4440]

This was the best explanation video I've seen on the matter... Kudos to you Mister...

[@ticos.thepsourinthone9150]

This video was hilariously informational, Ben! Thanks! Haha

[@salshouts]

This helped me alot! I am working on a project and my backend was almost finished. I was using create-react-app with router but switched over to next.js! Thanks alot

[@roshanican504]

You make my day better

[@laenprogrammation]

there is a workaround : just add conditional tag in the small server that builds your page. you can still use client side rendering except for meta tags

[@mateusnascimento1989]

Dude I was literally searching the name of this OPG yesterday. Thanks, dude!

[@mohamedaminebouguerra1514]

Woah! My self esteem skyrocketed because I managed to keep up with you until the end :D Aside from that, your content is top notch, keep it coming man.

[@cedric_lfbr]

I had to do that once, I used a Lambda function since it was hosted on AWS, and the function intercepts the CloudFront distribution request and updates the HTML if the request comes from a robot, adding the OpenGraph tags.

[@archmad]

I had similar issue. good thing you found a better solution.

[@bigdogsmallman]

I think you could easily do this in net core. In the startup class, in the configure for routing, you could filter each route with the correct meta tags. You could make this an extension and bing bang bosh, neat tidy job done

[@arthurbruel5545]

If the only thing that needs to change is the meta tags (not the rendered bits), you can also modify the html before returning it to the client, inserting the relevant meta tags. It will probably lead to performance problems, but you could also perform an if condition on the referrer of the request to determine if you should perform such modifications.

[@stephenyin3509]

Love the joke about girlfriend and client side rendering at the beginning

[@waynevanson277]

A solution to your problem could be to build a single page application, with each end point for the app being pre rendered. It's basically jamstack. Once a user loads one page, the others do not need to be loaded.

[@nilanjanmitra7459]

I use EJS and it allows for variables to be passed before sending the HTML to the client, so that can allow you to change the values in the meta tags.

[@AndreiNedelus]

Hey I saw Wes Bos in one of his videos, he used cloud functions to generate the preview and puppeteer i guess to take a screenshot of the url

[@gompro]

Very useful video as always

[@maxwellmuhanda7940]

this was so easy to understand am subscribed

[@BrotWurst]

7:20 would it be possible to use the same url but check the header value on the for example nginx server? like is this user agent a bot (twitter, fb, etc.) => proxy to your slim API for only the meta data response and if its a real user (mac, windows, chrome, firefox user agent etc.) => proxy to your real page / default response / SSR page. maybe im forgetting something. i dont know if this could work.

[@arpowers]

I love how Ben roasts Angular devs. I thought of that carrot farmer line off and on all day and cracked up every time.

[@tunyaa]

netlify has a free experimental feature called pre-rendering, for me, it works with Facebook, it parses the right meta tags automatically with pictures also. My content comes from a backend via graphql and apollo. meta is being set with react helmet, the page is handled by react-router, and it's a create react app project. Hope this helps. You can also do prerendering very very easily with react-snap package, but you need to rebuild when data changes. (PS. Thanks for your work, I really like your videos)

[@ufufu001]

the girlfriend problem might be solved if you stop walking around wearing asexual flag shirts

[@SayWhat6187]

hahaha

[@williamboshi1855]

lmao, good catch, respect

[@travistrue2008]

He's just playing hard to get. Karen gets it.

[@johnyepthomi892]

But with this if he ever gets one, she will be the right one. Lol

[@ragnarok7976]

He do check a lot of aesthetic boxes from the virgin meme... Though I probably do too 😆

[@PaulSebastianM]

For your sake and ours, I hope you DON'T get a girlfriend too soon.

[@dmytrolesyk4045]

Keep us updated, I'm curious if it'll work and what will be the most difficult part. Also, I did not quite understand why you decided not to use react-snap

[@PaulSebastianM]

If you manage the web server, you could use the web server's router to do the same exact hack you described without the need for a different subdomain, just a route that checks the user-agent of the client and returns different HTML based on it.

[@sajedsoliman4780]

You're great bro 💖💖

[@johnnietirado6131]

Had this issue while using a MeteorJS website running with ReactJs as the client side is that we created a crawler ( i think there is an npm project for this) that would go to every page, render it and save it on our DB. When a non-human (Google) would access the site it would served this rendered HTML, making it SEO friendly. Basically our server would use the User Agent to define what type of content the user would get served. Hope this help

[@rajatrao5632]

can you please explain what do you mean by 'render it and save it on db' , do you mean like render the dom elements and attach to html and store it in some link and add that link in db , or what exactly are you storing in db, if this is the case wouldn't it be too much for pages which are dynamic like /rob/photos, /sam/photos and likewise to be stored in db or am i missing something

[@alexsilny5748]

I had the same issue last week and also was thinking about moving to nextjs, but having a separate domain and server makes a lot more sense.

[@happysloth91]

well Next js or any other SSR solutions doesn't mean you're gonna use one server for the backend and the front-end.

[@alirezvani9149]

Now you can make static pages for you dynamic frequently updated pages with Nextjs, How it works's is that it looks at the requested page and if it is present from the build time, sends it back and if it is not built during build time, builds on the go(run time) and adds it to the built pages for the next request. pretty amazing and game changing !

[@SmujMaiku]

I had this problem once but my focus was towards crawlers. I ended up using some php to "render" the important bits like title, descriptions and links. Then the javascript would remove those elements and do the single page app business. It was back in carrot farmer code days but I'm sure happy coders can accomplish this just as well.

[@jimchapman4579]

Greate video! I use Laravel on the server side to serve up everything. Static html pages and React apps or a combo of both. It's easy to embed a react app within a .blade template file. Meanwhile Laravel takes care of everything else, like API services, user registration and authentication, etc. Best of both worlds.

[@brianevans4]

I think I might try react snap. That sounds good. Pre rendering on every build. Because often the layout of a page is the same even of the content changes. What do I mean by that: every reddit post will have the logo, the side bar, the footer and a div in the middle which contains the contents of the post. So you can prerender all that with an empty div, and then Hydrate it. Even with user generated content (as long as it is simple and consistent) you could prerender. Thanks for the video

[@ferbs8]

Nice content!

[@DanishAnton]

I was wondering what the previews you see on slack or text messages were called. Thanks

[@pyrotaze]

Great vid

[@BribedStudios]

Nice GatsbyJS colorway on that shirt 🤙

[@kirasmith1147]

I just used a node.js express server to host compiled create-react-app, this way you can modify the page and add meta tags if needed before serving the page. Sort of a mix of server and client side rendering as he said.

[@classik305]

Subbed for the consistent Angular claps 💀

[@krimo10]

This sounds brilliant and I would need this for my next mvp

[@ryszard3756]

Hello Ben, Have You thought about differences between react-snap and NextJS/Gatsby from SEO perspective? I mean is there reason to use NextJS instead just react-snap to get better results in search engines? Does NextJS/Gatsby do something extra to perform better in SEO? Regards

[@degraphe8824]

Wow I don't usually comment on these types of videos But bro This is amazing content please keep it up man

[@drewlee7435]

Best explanation, Ever.

[@ntcc2821]

I like your humour😂😂...great lesson as well

[@mortezatourani7772]

I liked the idea however, I think it is still good to have SSR for all users or maybe SEO as well. Would you share your ideas on uFrontends, too? Are you preparing some sort of tutorial on that or what?

[@jhonasn]

english is not my first language so i understanded only on second time i watched this, thanks for de vid i've not dev a site with link preview yet, very good to know it!

[@vutesaqu]

Could you use something like pug generate a html file like the normal one that just contains the with meta tag links that have and just send that instead of the normal blank html (instead of having to different by client) ?

[@kierangill4967]

Sapper + svelte gives you the best of both worlds

[@cauebahia]

It works! I do exactly that with my react web SPAs. I use firebase and cloud functions to detect user agents and serve SSR version on the fly to robots and CSR version to users. This is also important to SEO indexing, cause some robots won't run any JS and expect html-only responses. Really enjoy your videos.

[@leisiyox]

What about some prerender.io ?

[@cauebahia]

@@leisiyox I thought about using it, but never tried it. Don't know how well it works. It would also cost more than my current firebase cloud function solution.

[@leisiyox]

​@@cauebahia what are the conditions that you recommend using firebase? I thought about using it but I seek guidence

[@cauebahia]

@@leisiyox I like that they integrate lots of services in a single solution. When you create a firebase project, you instantly have access to file storage, hosting, database, authentication, and some other stuff that makes it really easy. I also like that Firestore has real-time listeners for your data. Really good for a client side rendered app. Also really like their documentation and the fact that you can easily access other Google Cloud services and API. There are many videos online about it. Check it out.

[@ChrisStayte]

Thanks Man!

[@jinxblaze]

u watched a 9 min video in 3 ?

[@ufufu001]

@@jinxblaze that is what true supporters do: they appreciate the content even before watching it. it's beautiful.

[@ChrisStayte]

@@jinxblaze TRIPPLE SPEED

[@jinxblaze]

@@ChrisStayte xD

[@m1dway]

Your solution at the end is valid. Use reverse proxy to detect the request, and forward them appropriately. However, it's best to use SSR from the beginning if that's your intention.

[@Rssks]

2:05 i do it this way: Server serves response for parsers (meta, og, schema, jsonld and plain html content) and then comes along js that structures it up and takes over routing from this point, so when you navigate you actually don't "refresh"

[@johnnamtae9610]

Hey Ben. Can you make a video of a list of all the terminology a web developer should know. Client side rendering ect..?

[@jeserodriguez]

I would use the same client-side bundle BUT adding a little bit of logic on the static assets server to add the meta tags to the HTML shell that embeds the client-side bundle. That way, you won't need to implement HTTP redirects, AND probably is better once you start working with deep-links for a mobile app.

[@maxcantube]

Going through a similar issue myself. My static site is hosted on S3 / CloudFront, orchestrated by terraform. My plan is to use CloudFront Origin Response triggers to trigger a lambda function to add the correct open graph tags to the response. I think this is the lightest weight option.

[@wanjohi]

Did you do it? Am exploring some of this ideas :)

[@DK-ox7ze]

Nice post. However I am curious as to why these FB bots can't read a client rendered app? I am sure that these bots are ultimately rendering the app on a web engine/browser, because they need to generate the preview of the rendered content. The static html will also most likely load some resources like CSS and JS over the network (unless the bot expects an inlined css/js), so it's not going to be an instant preview. So maybe the limitation is not technical but rather functional, in that the bot is probably not willing to wait too long for the page to load (which is the case with most client rendered apps)?

[@arafatzahan3697]

You are my spirit animal dude.

[@kavy6114]

Great solutions

[@pedroserapio8075]

Gatsby also solves the React single-page problem, since we can generate all the individual HTML, CSS, and JS pages.

[@rishabhrathod888]

For some wierd cases like mine where only /particularRoute need to work like SSR what i actually tried was hosted gatsby project in particular route of CRA project and it worked just need to handle few re-routing cases

[@alldecentnamestaken]

"It's like I spent a bunch of time building a house and now I want that house to fly." LMAO

[@zindev]

Nice video Ben. Try this out and make a video about the results please.

[@iamrohandatta]

You can use the header trick as you mentioned, and then simply use something like puppeteer to load the page on the server itself and then send the rendered HTML page to the client. If the header says it's from a normal user, then don't go to puppeteer, just return your usual index.html file.

[@iamrohandatta]

I got this idea from here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/opm9gHmLjpaqm9E

[@gilliangoud]

kinda curious what the increased load would be if you'd do this on the normal domain already -> check the user agent... Would eliminate cdn usage tho... so maybe not foolproof.

[@Manivelarino]

I just put my meta tags with variables like %PAGE_NAME% %PAGE_IMAGE% and replace these later while serving the page with express. doesn't work while client-side routing but It works for link previews.

[@rickyu1978]

Looking for exactly this solution. Was thinking of using aws api gateway to check the routes and then redirect based on headers. Social og links are super important for shareability..

[@zarghamkhan7948]

hi ben i dont know what you are talking about, i am addicted to listen to you, may be it will start making sense someday, i am still learning react and some other frontend libraries.

[@dcdales]

Cool stuff about magic links. Even if you hadn't talked about that, you mentioned 🥔. Automatic upvote.

[@nileriversoftware4070]

You ever tried NextJS? It does SSR for the initial request (b/c it could be a bot), but CSR when you click links.

[@mbaneshi]

How about mixing django template system with one spa like vue . What do you think ?

[@vorname1485]

Why do you want another domain for that. The server that delivers the app index.html could also deliver the meta response instead, based on user agent. One problem in both situations you could get (separate service or combined), is that the bots make checks whether the content they see is different to a regular user. Whether any of them does it, I don't know, but I would check this possibility.

[@CloudiaNgaming]

I love your humor.

[@MrSurfsAlot]

I love your humor

[@jesper.ordrup]

Nextjs? SSR on dynamic pages or static pages

[@leno__jeno]

Doesn't Netlify have the option to pre render single page applications for bots? (Originally for a better SEO) I'm not sure about this because I have never used this feature before, but shouldn't it also be able to solve this problem?

[@Sid91]

I wonder how you'll feel about Blazor, ASP.NET CORE released Blazor in order to do everything in C# and replace Javascript entirely ( I just started learning about it but it sounds like what they're doing, could be wrong)

[@sridharkatta3461]

Prisma2 is released so when are you going to do a video on that ?

[@mathisk5329]

Huh thats an interesting problem. You could, of course, only SSR the meta tags. Would be a nice little project to work on an ssr-meta-tag-proxy. Wonder how that would work

[@fun6789]

I think he meant that we should use Next / Nuxt from the beginning. I used to face these problems and since then I use Nuxt for every project and never worry about these problems again

[@toby6389]

Every time I have a problem with my apps I just wait for Ben to have them to so he can solve them for me.

[@PHAL__]

Dude, your video was reffered in a CodeAcademmy course for FullStack JS delopment.

[@nehtals]

Would the twitter/fb crawler follow a redirect? Or would it just grab the meta data and come back? In the latter case the user agent check wouldn't be required. Also, your users are going to grab the url from the browser bar and probably not user the share link you made special for them

[@amanrubey]

I will learn WebD so that I can enjoy these digs by Ben😂

[@ekaansh]

has there been a followup to this? video/repo?

[@victorbjorklund]

Nice solution. Only downside guess would be that Google wants you to show the same content to their bot as the user. But probably doesn't matter if you don't want to index those pages.

[@tim.bogdanov]

Hey Ben, what are your thoughts on react styled-components?

[@bawad]

I like it and use it

[@DubstepRS]

The preview still won't work when users copy paste the link directly from the browser url bar

[@uskro]

Facebook's user agent is there for the facebook app browser as well.

[@josephlardner-burke9400]

Why wouldn’t you just serve this over the server on a different port? As in send the result as a when someone searches that route?

[@wcandillon]

Very useful, thank you for pointing to react-snap. Happy Hacking Ben 🙌🏻

[@rahulramsaha7266]

I was just watching one of your videos on react native animation earlier xD Keep up the good job 🔥