Comparisons of Server-side Rendering and Client-side Rendering for Web Pages

Abstract: Page load speed on the web is one of the most important metrics for retaining users and the way a web page is rendered plays a big part in page load speed. There are many different ways to render a web page and the design of websites differs a lot, so in this paper a website was developed with differently designed layouts and then tested with client-side rendering and server-side rendering . The performance for each rendering method was tested with Google Lighthouse and Google DevTools Performance Insights. The tests showed that for web pages with fewer elements the choice of rendering method does not have a significant impact on the page loading speed of the web page. When the web page contains more content, which can be in the form of additional media or API calls, server side rendering is the better the choice when looking at rendering performance.