ReactJS app is most commonly known for making front-end development more easy and efficient. However, this famous library can sometimes be problematic for the search engines. Here, we are examining the React challenges for SEO and outlining the jobs of software engineers in improving the React websites’ search rankings.
In this blog, we are addressing the challenges that we have to face at the time of developing SEO-performant React websites and apps. Also, we have discussed various strategies in order to overcome them.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- How Google Indexes and Crawls Web Pages?
- Why Is It Challenging For SEO to Optimize React?
- Empty First-Pass Content
- User Experience and Loading Time
- Few Points That SEO Can Consider
- Customer-Side Rendering
- Conclusion
Introduction
React is designed in order to create impeccable and interactive UIs that are declarative, cross-platform, and modular. These days, it is the more popular JavaScript framework, which is used to write performant and intuitive front-end apps.
Although React was developed initially for writing Single Page Applications (SPAs), it is now responsible for creating full-fledged mobile apps and websites.
If you are highly experienced in custom web application development and hope into React, you might notice that a huge amount of your CSS and HTML code is moving into JavaScript. It is because React does not recommend the direct creation and update of the UI elements.
But, instead of describing the “state” of the UI, React updates the DOM in order to match the state in an efficient way.
As a result, all the changes to the DOM or UI should be made with the help of React’s engine. Although it is convenient for software developers, it might mean longer loading times for the users and more work for the search engines in order to index and find the content.
How Google Indexes and Crawls Web Pages?
Google receives more than 90% of all the online searches. Here are some of the indexing and crawling processes of Google:.
- Googlebot is responsible for maintaining a crawl queue.
- It contains all the URLs that Google needs to index and crawl in the future.
- When the crawler is idle, it spots the next URL in the queue.
- Then it makes a request and fetches the HTML.
- Googlebot determines the need to execute and fetch JavaScript.
- It is for rendering the content after parsing the HTML.
- If it is a yes, then you can add the URL to a render queue.
- After this, the renderer is responsible for fetching and executing the JavaScript in order to render the page.
- It then sends the rendered HTML back to the processing unit.
- The processing unit is responsible for extracting all the URLs tags.
- These tags are mentioned on the web page and adds them back to the crawl queue.
- Finally, the content will be added to Google’s index.
You might have noticed that there is a significant distinction between the Processing stage, which is responsible for parsing HTML and the Renderer stage, which executes the JavaScript.
This distinction also exists because the execution of JavaScript is quite expensive. So, when Googlebot crawls a webpage, it also parses the HTML at the same time before queuing the JavaScript in order to run later.
Why Is It Challenging For SEO to Optimize React?
We have now surpassed the brief introduction to Googlebot, indexing, and crawling.
There are still software engineers who should identify the potential issues that search engines face.
This should be done while trying to index and crawl React pages.
Here we can understand with more clarity what makes Reactjs app SEO challenging and what software developers can do in order to overcome and address a few of these challenges.
Empty First-Pass Content
As we know, React-based apps rely mainly on JavaScript, and most of the time they run into problems with search engines. It is because React includes a by default application shell model.
The initial HTML does not include any meaningful content, and a bot or a user must execute JavaScript in order to see the actual content of the page.
This approach is responsible for making Googlebot detect the empty page at the time of the first pass. Although the content will be seen by Google only after the page rendering, it may delay the content indexing while dealing with a large number of pages.
User Experience and Loading Time
As we know, Fetching, executing, and parsing JavaScript takes a lot of time. Also, JavaScript can make network calls to fetch the content, and the user might need to wait for a long time before viewing the requested information.
Google also lays out a number of web vitals that relate to the user experience, which you can use in the ranking criteria of Google.
A longer loading time can affect the score of user experience.
Few Points That SEO Can Consider
Here are the considerations that are related to setting up great SEO practices.
- Must have an impeccable and optimal URL structure in order to give search engines and humans the right idea for expecting on the page.
- The perfect optimization of the robots.txt file might help in searching the bots to understand how to crawl pages on a website.
- You can also use a CDN in order to serve a number of static assets such as CSS, fonts, JS, and many more.
Customer-Side Rendering
Client-side rendering also known as Customer-side rendering is a render path, which is by default for a React SPA. The server serves a shell application that does not contain any content.
Once the browser parses, executes, and downloads the included JavaScript sources, you can significantly render the HTML content.
The client app is responsible for handling the routing function by managing the history of your browser. It signifies that you can serve the HTML file without thinking about the requested route.
Conclusion
We hope you will find this article helpful. After going through this article, you will be easily able to understand how Reactjs applications play a vital role in improving the web application SEO. Also, we have covered the strategies that you can follow in order to overcome all the challenges. Please provide your valuable feedback in the comment section below.
