We’re currently in the process of auditing a client’s site and among the many, many, many, strange decisions and technical issues was a decision to client-side render all of the content for an e-commerce site.
Why Is This Bad?
Well, it turns out that Search Console (and therefore, Google) is completely confused and is listing a bunch of soft-404s, non-indexable pages, and is just generally having a rough time crawling the site. This has led to a marked drop in search traffic, which in turn has seriously hurt their bottom line.
In fact, the contrast between the old site (traditional server-side rendering) and this new one (React client-side rendering) is stark. We were able to identify the specific day the new site was launched.
Fortunately, we’re working with a super talented partner on this project and they were able to get the React code to switch from client-side rendering to server-side rendering. They weren’t the ones who built this site and they have been scratching their heads about a lot of decisions made by the last team as well.
As a final note on this subject, when it comes to React, the general rule for deciding between server-side vs client-side is whether or not SEO is important. It’s fairly well known to seasoned devs that client-side causes issues with SEO and, despite its technical advantages, should be avoided for public-facing pages where SEO is important
What's Next?
Now that the site has been switched over to server-side rendering, we’re seeing some structured HTML. There’s still more work to do as some elements are still loading as JSON data that gets rendered in JS to the DOM.
While it’s a huge improvement, the next step is to either structure the JSON into something more SEO-friendly (like JSON-LD) or completely render the HTML, including all of the “painted” elements on the server-side before it gets pushed out as code.
Related Article: Does Google Pick up Rendered JS?
In the meantime, we’re going to monitor Search Console and hope that this new solution resolves some of the major issues we’re seeing:
- Huge increase in soft-404s
- Huge increase in non-indexed pages
- Sharp drop in organic search traffic due to “empty” page
If you’re having these kinds of problems and don’t know where to turn for help, drop us a line! We live for these kinds of technical deep dive problems.