SPA's and that first page load time

Phoenix Forum Questions / Help
1

I’ve only built mobile apps so building a web based SPA is new to me, but it seems that one downside is that you’d need two round trips from the server to display content:

Round trip 1: get the client
Round trip 2: get the dynamic content

I’m wondering if having the first page be server rendered would be a good compromise. Then get the client and the dynamic content in one pass, and from then on make REST API calls to the server. Or is there a better way to do it?

2

That’s pretty much how it works subject to having to run node server side.

3

Keep in mind that due to the static nature of the SPA part after the initial visit the html / css / js is all cached. This means that on subsequent visits you’re basically just doing the dynamic content.

2 Likes
4

I’m watching some interesting developments around isomorphic javascript that addresses this issue. https://github.com/angular/universal comes to mind.

1 Like
5

I don’t think isomorphic javascript is going to have staying power. It seems most useful for the now-past era when Google’s spiders didn’t have native javascript ability so SPA’s got dinged in terms of SEO. So it’s most important use case has already passed.

But I do see the lingering need to reduce that first page load time. It would be for logged-out users by definition (if you were logged in, you’d have the client already). I would think that most frameworks use Redis to send the client and the (cached) dynamic content, but it seems like Phoenix is fast enough that no one uses Redis. So I believe that means using a standard server-rendered page.

6

Google is not the only search engine, and there are a lot of corner cases and limits on how google bot does index
SPAs