Angular Server-Side Rendering (SSR)

Understanding Server-Side Rendering (SSR) and Its Benefits

Better Performance: What happens here is that SSR reduces the time it takes for a web page to become interactive by sending pre-rendered HTML to the browser. This in turn leads to quicker first page load times and enhanced perceived performance.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Search engines can crawl and index pre-rendered HTML content more effectively than client-side-rendered content. SSR improves the discoverability of web pages and can positively impact search engine rankings.

Enriched Consumer Experience: If an individual is on a slower connection, SSR will provide them with a faster view of the content and thus contributes to a better user experience across various devices and network conditions.

Social Media Sharing Support: To get better previews and more engagement while sharing links to your web application, pre-rendered HTML content can be shared on social media platforms.

Implementing SSR with Angular Universal

Angular Universal Installation: Angular Universal includes some utilities and tools for implementing server-side rendering in Angular applications. You can install this package into your existing angular project by using angular CLI.

                        
                        ng add @nguniversal/express-engine
                        
                    

Generate Universal Application: Angular Universal generates a separate Angular application that runs on the server side. Use Angular CLI to generate the universal application.

                        
                        ng generate universal --clientProject PROJECT_NAME
                        
                    

Universal Application Configuration: Customizing server configuration files such as routes.ts according to the needs of our application is possible with angular universal since it ships default with express server

Build and Serve: After building the universal app for production, you should deploy it to your server

                        
npm run build:ssr
npm run serve:ssr
                        
                    

Test & Debugging: Ensure that the behavior of your SSR enabled app is correct both client side and server side; Additionally, debugging issues related to Server Side Rendering might require logging on servers or making use of proxy servers designed for debugging purposes.

Additional Considerations:

State management, asynchronous data fetching and compatibility with third-party libraries may be some of the challenges encountered with SSR. It might help if you consider using server-side data pre-fetching techniques as well as universal-friendly libraries that can deal with these obstacles.

Optimize the performance of your server so that it responds quickly and scales easily under heavy traffic conditions.