SEO and performance – an introduction

Since the rise of the first big search engines, web developers have struggled to find a way to optimize their web applications to get better positioning in search results on Google, Bing, Yandex, DuckDuckGo, and many other popular search engines.

With the evolution of frontend web frameworks, things became even more complicated. While React, Angular, Vue (and many others) provide a fantastic way to deal with complex UIs, they make things a bit harder for web spiders, the bots responsible for indexing websites into a search engine. They need to execute JavaScript, wait for the UI to render, and eventually index highly dynamic web pages. In addition, many contents would be initially hidden, as they get generated dynamically by JavaScript on the frontend directly following user interaction.

That caused many problems and made countless developers regret the good old days when the web was essentially server side rendered, where JavaScript...