Different forms of hydration are available for use. Learn about them and how you can use them to provide your users with better service.
When discussing SPAs and server-side rendering, the phrase “rehydration,” or simply “hydration,” frequently comes up.
Although it is a necessary step for serving rendered content to users, hydration does not, in essence, have an impact on SEO.
Different forms of hydration are available for use.
Different forms of hydration may already be supported by various tech stacks and frameworks.
What Is Rehydration?
Simply put, rehydration enables a web application or page to achieve its interactive state following server-side rendering.
Although search engines might not care, it is crucial to do this correctly if the website offers visitors rendered, interactive components.
Client-side material is “hydrated” for the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) in single-page applications (SPAs) along with server-side rendering, which speeds up the First Contentful Paint (FCP).
As a result, the procedure entails serializing the state of the page or application on the client side and booting the JavaScript components into interactivity using JavaScript that has been loaded or linked to in the HTML response.
In this context, the term “hydration” is used to refer to the initialization of all elements on the webpage.
This naturally needs less work from Googlebot to produce the webpage and can improve Core Web Vital results. Additionally, since Google’s WRS (Web Rendering Service) is not required, search engines can index content faster.
Progressive Rehydration Explained
As parts of a page are launched one at a time, progressive rehydration, which uses both server-side rendering and client-side rendering (CSR), improves the rendering and interactivity of individual components.
Because nodes are hydrated gradually rather than all at once, progressive rehydration enables JavaScript components to be loaded more slowly.
The overall loading time can be shortened by allowing components that might not be necessary to be initialized right away.
In fact, even before the JavaScript is run, both users and search engine bots and crawlers can begin seeing and interacting with the pages.
A classic SSR problem where a server-rendered Document Object Model (DOM) tree is quickly rebuilt is one that is avoided via progressive rehydration.
What Is Partial Rehydration?
Partial rehydration is a different type of rehydration that enables the hydration of particular JavaScript components, or more specifically, “islands,” without hydrating all of the components.
SSR and CSR are combined in this method.
In this instance, the client also receives content that has been rendered on the server along with an initial HTML document. The client-side JavaScript initiates and modifies the DOM once it has been loaded in order to add or change existing content on designated ‘islands.’
This indicates that rather than updating the full page, JavaScript updates certain portions of it.
One effective method for performance-optimizing SPAs for loading effectiveness and performance is partial rehydration.
Nevertheless, it has drawbacks because client-side navigation and caching might be made more difficult.
A Look At Trisomorphic Rendering
Trisomorphic rendering is less popular among the technical SEO and development communities.
The procedure entails producing SPAs on the server, client, and on a service worker to display HTML for navigational purposes.
The procedure combines HTML navigation rendering by the service worker with streaming server-side rendering, which renders first navigations. The relevant content is delivered to search engines thanks to the streaming server-side rendering.
It allows for the updating of cached components and templates as well as SPA-style navigations for rendering new views within the same session in the world of development.
When Is It Best To Use Rehydration?
Rehydration is essential for highly interactive websites, like single-page applications, as it speeds up initial load times and enhances user experience.
To choose the right form of hydration for your website, you must understand how your tech stack functions.
Alternatives to hydration include resumability, which varies depending on where and when the code runs.
Resumability is a possible replacement for hydration and can almost completely eliminate the requirement for JavaScript to be run when the page loads, allowing for practically “instant” apps as opposed to hydration-based ones.
The server rebuilds the application and serializes it into HTML when the client sends a request to it. The client is subsequently sent the HTML.
When a user interacts with a page element, only that event handler is retrieved and processed on demand. The client then picks up where the server left off with the application.
Frameworks for resumability are not new concepts. For its Search and Photos products, Google has utilized a resumable framework internally called Wiz, while eBay employs a framework called Marko that now includes resumability as a feature.
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