Server-side rendering of Single Page Apps

In the simplest case, a Single Page App is merely an empty HTML body with JavaScript and template elements used to bring the page to life. Web developers have begun to re-consider this starting point for SPAs. Even if an empty body tag is digestible by Googlebot and acceptable to screen-readers, there’s a performance problem. The quintessential case study is Twitter, who found it’s not such a good idea to send and run a megabyte of scripts just to view 140 characters. They returned to server-side rendering in 2012 to improve their “Time to first tweet” metric.