Server Side Rendering

👨‍💻 Framework Development 📖 Documentation
1

We can use this topic to talk about how we explain Frontity’s Server Side Rendering.

This is the info we have right now in the Github repository:

» How does Frontity work?

Frontity is a React app that lives in Node.js, separated from WordPress.

  • It uses the WP API to retrieve content and generate the final HTML.
  • It is also capable to generate AMP pages with the same React code and CSS.
Frontity & WordPress explanation
frontity-wordpress-explanation.png1258Ă—906 60.8 KB

Why a different Node.js server?

React is a JavaScript library. In order to generate HTML for the visitors or Google, the server needs to be able to run JavaScript as well.

In theory a PHP server can send an empty HTML with the JavaScript files and the visitor will see the page after the JavaScript has loaded, but it is not a good user experience and certainly not recommended if your site needs to rank in Google.

Frontity is prepared to be hosted either in a regular Node.js server or in serverless services like AWS Lambda, Now, Netlify, Google Functions and so on. That makes it super cheap and infinitely scalable.

2

In the future we will support Static Rendering (like Next.js and Gatsby) but I guess we should not advertise it yet.

3

This is what we have in the docs right now:

Server Side Rendering

Frontity responds with a fully populated HTML file generated with React . This reduces the time required for the first contentful paint and ensures that the SEO is not harmed .

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5

Hi, is it possible to set up Frontity so that it only works in SSR mode ? ie. make Frontity respond to every request with a fully populated HTML page. For security reasons, we’d like a scenario where only the Frontity/Node server has access to the Wordpress REST APIs.

Many Thanks,
Beemer

6

Frontity only works in SSR mode (it doesn’t have a static generation mode)