[zihotki]

From personal experience for general web-sites like blogs, etc. it's better to do them old way, you don't need to worry much about seo, caching, precompilation, etc. But business apps huge community-like ones, and big shops benefit a lot from frameworks like that. But you should always base your decision on cost of implementation, support, etc.

[myf01d]

Thanks, I am more interested in developing social websites with modern look and more performance, I mean like the design of medium.com or hashnode.com, I think they do render the first page fully canonical HTML, and then every subsequent request is rendered using the js framework GETing some JSON which gives more space to the server to do other work.

I am really interested in this approach but I fear about the SEO and any additional unnecessary complexities like compatibility with old browsers and OSs especially in Android.

[angry-hacker]

Take a look at russian vk.ru

It's lighting fast compared FB and does all the same things. Really neet. FB makes my laptop literally over heat.

[kimshibal]

If you fear about the SEO, start with Turbolinks.

[snarkyturtle]

React in particular, however, was specifically made to handle the state of just parts of the UI on Facebook (like notifications). You could build out a static site but let React handle something more complicated and it'll work just as fine, if not better.

It just so happens that the extensibility around React led to stuff like redux and react-router that's perfect for SPA's, but at its core it's just a View layer that could live alongside a traditional site.