I am about to relaunch our website, but I am uncertain whether I should go with a Vue.js SPA webpage or a Nuxt.js SSR webpage. The big advantage of an SPA webpage is that it has an app-like feeling when using the webpage, which massively increases the user experience. Try it out yourself and visit the mobile version of airbnb.com on your smartphone. It feels like a native app.
However, the big downside of an SPA webpage is that it is rendered by the client (client-side rendering, also called CSR). This means the web server just serves an empty HTML skeleton and the actual content will be populated by JavaScript. This is a problem for Googlebot, as it has to act like a real web browser in order to populate the content and understand it.
I have read plenty of articles about how capable the Googlebot is at understanding SPA webpages. Some suggest going with SSR (server-side rendering) to avoid any issues with SEO, and some say it is a manageable issue. Some articles also suggest going with an SPA webpage and pre-render the webpage. This would mean that a normal user will see a JavaScript-based website that will populate the content dynamically, but the Googlebot will be served with a static HTML version of the webpage.
This is indeed a good idea, but this is not a solution which fits my needs as pre-rendering is not really a good at scaling and our webpage is constantly adding new pages. Therefore, this is not really an option.
With all that being said, I would like to know what your thoughts are. Will it be able to build an SPA webpage which performs as good as a traditional or SSR webpage when it comes to SEO?
Sadly, Google has not provided any updates in recent years about how capable they are of crawling SPA/CSR webpages. Therefore, I am quite unsure.
