For the better part of a decade, the web development community has operated under a powerful default assumption: if you’re building a serious, modern web experience, you build a Single Page Application (SPA). You reach for React, Vue, or Angular. You build an “app.”

This approach, born from the need to create complex, desktop-like experiences in the browser (think Figma, Google Maps, or Trello), has been incredibly successful. So successful, in fact, that we’ve started applying this app-centric philosophy to everything—our blogs, our marketing sites, our e-commerce stores.

We’ve become so obsessed with building “apps” that we’ve forgotten a fundamental question: what if the thing you’re building… isn’t an app at all? What if it’s a website? And what if building it like an app is the worst possible decision you can make?

The Price of Pretending: When Websites Wear App Costumes

A true web app is defined by high interactivity and complex state management. A website is defined by its primary goal: delivering content. When we use app architecture for a content-first website, we pay a steep, often hidden, price.

1. The Blank White Screen of Death

You know the experience. You click a link and are greeted by a blank white page and a loading spinner. This is the hallmark of a client-side rendered SPA. The server sends a nearly empty HTML file, and it’s up to the user’s device—their phone, their laptop—to download, parse, and execute a mountain of JavaScript just to render the initial content.

You’re essentially shipping a puzzle to your users and asking them to solve it before they can read your article.

2. The SEO & Performance Penalty

This “puzzle” approach is terrible for both users and search engines.

  • Slow LCP: Your Largest Contentful Paint, a key Core Web Vital, is delayed until your JavaScript framework finally renders the main content.
  • SEO Hurdles: While Google has gotten better at crawling JavaScript, it’s still not perfect. You’re forcing crawlers to do extra work, and there’s always a risk of misinterpretation. Server-rendered HTML is explicit, guaranteed, and instantly understood by any crawler on earth.
  • The Hydration Tax: Even with server-side rendering workarounds in SPA frameworks, the browser often has to “hydrate” the page—a process of attaching event listeners and rebuilding a virtual DOM, essentially doing a lot of the work a second time.

The Hero We Forgot: The Humble Server

What’s the alternative? It’s the architecture that built the web and remains undefeated for content delivery: Server-Side Rendering (SSR).

It’s a beautifully simple concept:

  1. A user requests a page.
  2. The server does the hard work. It fetches data, renders the complete HTML page, and sends it to the browser.
  3. The browser receives a fully-formed, content-rich document and can display it immediately.
  4. JavaScript is then loaded to add interactivity—a process often called “progressive enhancement.”

This isn’t just about old-school PHP or Python scripts. The power of SSR is experiencing a major renaissance in the modern development world. Frameworks like Next.js, Astro, SvelteKit, and Nuxt are built around this “server-first” philosophy, combining a fantastic developer experience with superior performance.

The benefits are undeniable:

  • Near-instant first paint. Users see content right away.
  • Flawless SEO by default.
  • Increased resilience. The site is readable even if the JavaScript fails.

Conclusion: Choose the Right Tool for the Job

A Single Page Application is a powerful tool for building complex applications. But it’s a specialized tool, not a universal solution.

The next time you start a project, pause before you type create-react-app. Ask yourself the critical question: “Am I building a website or a web app?”

If your primary goal is to deliver content, the answer is almost always a website. And for that, the most modern, performant, and user-friendly choice you can make is to embrace the lost art of server-side rendering.

Let’s stop building heavy, slow apps when what our users, and our businesses, truly need is a fast, reliable website.

Have you ever felt the pain of using an app framework for a content site? Let’s discuss this in the comments.