Single Page App SEO
I’m considering enabling server side rendering for my Ember side project, HackSource to help with SEO. Since google claims their crawler can “generally” support JavaScript apps, I’m not sure it is worth the complexity to add it.
What do you think? Has anyone seen a significant boost in organic traffic after enabling client side rendering for a SPA?
Indie Hackers is an Ember app that renders on the server via Fastboot. Unfortunately I don't have much helpful data to share, because (a) I haven't focused on SEO much, and (b) I set up Fastboot immediately, so there's no before-and-after.
I can tell you that the site "seems" to load much faster with Fastboot, which is a big enough benefit by itself imo. But it's a lot bigger and more bloated than your site is, and your site seems to load very quickly. So maybe wait and avoid premature optimization, because Fastboot setup is kind of a pain and definitely adds some overhead to development.
Thanks for sharing your experience Courtland! Good point about site speed, that would be a clear benefit for users. I’m curious, why did you decide to enable Fastboot straight away?
It was some combination of the following reasons:
Also, I should note that LinkedIn is built entirely in Ember, and they don't seem to be using Fastboot, but they have great SEO. For example, this page is number 3 in Google if you search for "banner bank". However when you visit it while signed into LinkedIn, you get the loading screen while the Ember app boots up, and you can view the source to verify that they haven't rendered the HTML on the server. And if you visit that page without being signed into LinkedIn, it doesn't show you anything but a login screen!
Still, they manage to rank highly. Worth thinking about.
This comment was deleted 9 years ago