Harness Speed: Prioritize Server-Side Rendering

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Server-side rendering (SSR) generates HTML on the server to ensure rapid response times for users accessing web pages. By doing so, users receive content immediately—essential for maintaining engagement and optimizing search engine visibility. After delivering static HTML, hydration is initiated through inlined scripts to activate client-side interactivity, particularly utilizing React hooks. This process balances fast content delivery with necessary functionality, and is widely adopted by high-traffic websites focused on SEO, cementing SSR as a best practice in web development.

React is an open-source front-end JavaScript library maintained by Meta. It was first released in 2013 and is now the most popular web framework.

Ilya Gurevich is a Senior Software Engineer at The New York Times. Last winter, his team set out to implement React 18 for The Times’ flagship core news site. Ilya recently wrote a viral blog post about this decision, and how the team tackled some of the engineering challenges along the way.

Today he joins the podcast with Gregor Vand to talk about adopting React 18 to enhance the performance of the The New York Times website.

Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, and is the founder and CTO of Mailpass. Previously, Gregor was a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He has been based in Asia Pacific for almost a decade and can be found via his profile at vand.hk.