The New React Documentation Ditches SPA Apps

Back in the days if you visited a website, or web app, it had to reload the page each time you navigated to a different page. It was inconvenient for several reasons. One of these was that the whole content was refreshed, so you lost your scroll position and all the data, and it was slow.

Later an idea of SPA was born. Single-page applications don’t refresh the page, rather they are served with one HTML file, and one, or more JS and CSS files. The application is changing content of the app dynamically, so no refresh is needed. That’s how dynamic pages were born.

Unfortunately, there is a disadvantage to this method. Search engine crawlers are unable to index dynamic pages. In spite of all the declarations, Google, and other search engines are incapable of indexing and sensing an SPA website. So SPA always comes with a SEO penalty.

For that reason, some ideas evolved to use modern SPA libraries and frameworks like React, Angular, Ember and satisfy search engines. Also, having a server that serves sub-pages and loads only necessary data as needed, while preserving dynamics can sometimes improve SEO metrics and load speeds.

Of course not all use cases require SEO support and top load speeds. These are necessary for publicly available sites, like e-commerce stores or publishing sites. On the…