[Twirrim]

Client side rendering sucks for anyone on high latency networks (a significant potential customer base). From an SEO perspective it leaves you subject to whenever the search engine has rendering capacity available.

There's some good write up here: https://medium.com/@benjburkholder/javascript-seo-server-sid...

Essentially content that requires client side rendering gets stuck waiting for Google to have resources available to render the content, which is likely scaled to keep the queue at what _they_ determine to be a reasonable length. That can mean a lag of up to days or weeks after the page was first touched before they have the content indexed and in SEO. Worse, search engines don't cache javascript the same way that your end users do. An end user returning to your site likely has all your javascript pre-cached ready to go. A search engine will be starting from scratch each time. That's a lot more requests hitting your server (vs server-side rendering) and so a slower page response time (which impacts SEO rank)

My first gut instinct to this hybrid SSR-CSR approach in the article was that it's nasty, but I really like the trade-off they hit. That's a really nice failure mode. Something happening on the client side is way better than nothing, even if that something is slow.

On a side note, server-side rendering is almost certainly more efficient overall. When running under a JIT environment, methods will have already been compiled down to native code. The code is likely already in memory and ready to execute so there is no parsing / compilation time involved (and you have the advantage of OS level caching, cpu caches etc on your side). The server CPU is almost certainly faster than the client's CPU and will be more likely to be in an awake state (there is measurable latency in a CPU waking from any of the sleep or lower power/frequency states). You're trading off once-per-server parse/compilation phase vs one-per-client-per-access.

[danpalmer]

As a plus to the SSR part, you’ll also likely have any API resources either already loaded out of the database, or very close in latency to the renderer, whereas on the client you could easily be 100ms of latency plus other overheads away.