[blhack]

>It sounds from this article that server rendering is more advantageous?

Rendering on the server feels faster to the user. With client side rendering, you will often get a skeleton of the site that loads, and then the content that fills that skeleton 100ms or so apart from one another. This sounds like nothing, but it is perceptible to the user.

There are absolutely ways around this, but even the Big Guys get it wrong sometimes (for instance: facebook).

[andrewstuart2]

Initial page load feels faster when rendered on the server. The very moment you navigate to another part of the site, client-side rendering is a huge win for apparent load times. Not only can you give the user feedback that something's loading, but you only need to retrieve the delta from the server between the page you're on now and the one you're going to. Within a few clicks, the amortized cost of the SPA in terms of both latency and over-the-wire size is already lower.