Angular – Performance/Crawl-ability – Json to Jekyll – Thoughts?

[tomkazarian]

I've considered a rebuild of Lionseek.com (from CodeIgniter to ROR + AngularJS). The site has been a nighttime/weekend project for awhile, but receives over 1 million pageviews/month organically and I've been lucky because it continues to grow.

Since most of the traffic is organic and most of the list/grid pages are updated every minute or so, AngularJS is a little concerning for crawl-ability and performance. In May of this year Google said they more-or-less support JS front-ends but it's obvious that pure html is better - even when it relates to load-time performance.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this approach:

1. Replace most of the ROR views with standard HTML. Take out NG tags Use a static site generator for most pages: http://jekyllrb.com/docs/templates/ > Ruby

2. Move all the business logic into a RestFUL JSON API.

3. Smash data from API with templates in 1 on a periodic basis (every n minutes)

4. Deploy updated HTML files to CDN

5. For anything dynamic, use simple AJAX to fetch info from APIs in 2

Thank you