Wappler for lean, server-side-driven, SEO-focused Website?

[master_of_web]

Hi
I’m planing on build a new project: a data driven product comparison website.

It’s going to be a rather “normal” DB-based websites with some interactive components (like filters, voting, forms etc) and not a real app. The main source of traffic will be SEO, so having everything perfect for search engines is top priority.

From my past experiences and from testing some of the wappler-showcase-projects, I don’t think wappler is ideal for this. The main reasons are:

• (almost) all data is fetched dynamically on the client side. When when the regular crawlers see the page, they will finde no data or internal links. And the JS-crawlers ony visits the pages in long intervals.
• There is a lot of unused CSS and JS from bootstrap and ServerConnect that result in a rather bad Core Web Vitals score.

Is there any option to build a more lean and server-side-rendered website with wappler? And if not now, sometime in the future?

My alternatives are using

• Wordpress and Plugins for working with custom/dynamic Data: Regular SSR websites by nature. Great visual configuration and speed optimization plugins, but lack some flexibility for the really complex logic
• a modern node.js framework like astro or svelt: great for using SSR/SSG/CSR based on usecase and component based template building so you only loade the CSS&JS you really need. But I would have to code everything myself.

Wappler could be the perfekt compromise with a visual builder and great flexibility and I would be using it for a more app-like project. But I really need the SEO-features, since all my competitors websites are perfectly optimized as well.

[Teodor]

Crawlers / search engine bots really have no issues with the dynamic data. When they crawl your page, they render the page and “see” all the data, so server-side rendering is not really needed.
You can see this in our showcases, one of the big dynamic sites built with Wappler is perfectly optimized and indexed: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:zoobasel.ch

[master_of_web]

Well, kind of.
Google and co still have a separate crawler for rendering site with and without JS. The regular crawler that does most of the job, is still without JS execution. Since rendering JS take a lot more computing power, the JS-crawler only fetches the site once in a while.

So, yes, most sites will index kind of ok, but it can take longer and can be hickups between the crawls.

You can seen this when lookin at the cached version of https://www.zoobasel.ch/en/zoobesuch/r/2/eintrittspreise/ :
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1X6cbmMKDeEJ:https://www.zoobasel.ch/en/zoobesuch/r/2/eintrittspreise/&cd=2&hl=de&ct=clnk&gl=de

If the whole project is focused around SEO, I cant take any chances.

But anyway, I don’t want to start a SEO discussion. Just wanted to know if these new concepts like SSR and component architecture are possible or planed for the (near) future.

[Apple]

@master_of_web

(almost) all data is fetched dynamically on the client side. When when the regular crawlers see the page, they will finde no data or internal links. And the JS-crawlers ony visits the pages in long intervals.

You can use Server-Side Bindings in Wappler NodeJS, even though it’s not perfect (not as good support in UI during development) I think it’s an acceptable solution

[Teodor]

Similar topic from yesterday:

Server Side Rendering (SSR) NodeJS and SEO concerns

You can set the server action in the App Properties on the page [image] Output of the server connect should be directly accessible like <%= $_POST.input1 %>, you can also use expressions with <%= _('$_POST.input1.lowercase()') %>. EJS templates are just javascript, so looping over data could be done like: <ul> <% for (const item of query1.data) { %> <li><%= item.label %></li> <% } %> </ul>

[hisoka]

This was the same concern I had yesterday in the post that @Teodor just shared.

@Teodor

Crawlers / search engine bots really have no issues with the dynamic data. When they crawl your page, they render the page and “see” all the data, so server-side rendering is not really needed.
You can see this in our showcases, one of the big dynamic sites built with Wappler is perfectly optimized and indexed: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:zoobasel.ch

Like @master_of_web said the problem is Google have 2 index, the regular index and the rendered index. So Google leaves Javascript rendering for a second wave of indexing. It’s as if it said, “oops, this is going to take me a while and I’ll put it in a drawer for later”.:

Rendered indexing takes a lot of time to visit your page and exhaust your crawl budget quicker, plus on major updates Google disable the rendered indexing for saving of computing power.This maybe is not a big problem for sites that dosn’t need perfect SEO, but for sites that rely on SEO is a big problem.

I’m trying to learn all the info people shared in the other post but I have one doubt:

• Is there a way to make repeaters Server Side Rendered?