Server-Side Rendering (SSR)

Even though server-side rendering (SSR) sounds like a new term in the developer’s vocabulary, it’s actually the most common way of serving web pages. If we think of languages such as PHP, Ruby, or Python, they all render the HTML on the server before sending it to the browser, which will make the markup dynamic once all the JavaScript content has been loaded.

Well, Next.js does the same thing by dynamically rendering an HTML page on the server for each request, then sending it to the web browser. The framework will also inject its scripts to make the server-side rendered pages dynamic in a process called hydrationHydration is a process in which client-side JavaScript converts a static HTML web page into a dynamic web page..

Imagine we’re building a blog and want to display all the articles written by a specific author on a single page. This can be a great use case for SSR: a user wants to access this page, so the server renders it and sends the resulting HTML to the client. At this point, the browser will download all the scripts requested by the page and hydrate the DOM, making it interactive without any kind of page refresh or glitch. From this point, thanks to React hydration, the web app can also become a single-page application (SPA), ...