SPAs and React: You Don’t Always Need Server-Side Rendering

The React docs suggest picking one of the popular React-powered frameworks that support server-side rendering (SSR) — but do you need SSR?

As you may have noticed, the Start a New React Project section of the React docs no longer recommends using CRA (Create React App). Create React App used to be the go-to approach for building React applications; (that only required client-side routing and page rendering). Now, however, the React docs suggest picking one of the popular React-powered frameworks that support server-side rendering (SSR).

I’ve built applications with everything you’ll see on that list of “production-grade React frameworks,” but I also spent many years building SPAs (Single Page Applications) that only needed client-side functionality — and everything was fine.

Whilst there are many applications that do need server-side rendering, there are also many applications that don’t. By opting to choose an SSR React framework, you might be creating problems rather than solving them.