A few days ago Netflix tweeted that they'd removed client-side React.js from their landing page and they saw a 50% performance improvement. It caused a bit of a stir.
Server side rendering a React app can provide a few different benefits including performance and SEO. The problem is with those benefits comes a cost of additional complexity to your application. In this post, we’ll start from scratch and slowly build a server side rendered React (with React Router) while breaking down some of the complexity as we go.