Some crawlers like Google Search have gotten smarter! Google's crawler uses Chrome 41 to execute JavaScript and render the final page, but that process is still new and not perfect. JavaScript-based applications are here to stay, which means that in many cases, our content can be invisible to crawling tools. The modern web has evolved into something much different. Search engine crawlers, social sharing platforms, have historically relied exclusively on static HTML markup to index the web and surface content. There's no reason to bring another tool (headless Chrome and Puppeteer) into the mix. If your framework has a prerendering solution, please stick with that.

Some frameworks like Preact ship with tools that address server-side rendering. You're here for that quick win to reduce JavaScript startup cost and improve first meaningful paint. The other reason you might be here is because some articles out on The Web mentioned that server-side rendering is good for performance. What matters is that you spent a lot of time building Awesome Web Thing and users are unable to discover it. To be honest, your tech stack doesn't matter. First, you've built a web app and it's not being indexed the search engines! Your app might be a Single Page Application (SPA), PWA, using vanilla JS, or built with something more complex like a library or framework. If SEO has served me well, you landed on this article for one of two reasons.

Read more about Node's ES Modules support. Feel free to use require() statements if they bother you. I'll be using ES modules ( import) in this article, which require Node 8.5.0+ and running with the -experimental-modules flag.

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