How good is React for SEO?

See the source of your page once. Google bot usually favors websites with well-structured code. If your code has a load of bloat codes like too many divs etc., it won't rank easily. It is always better to have the HTML being generated on the server end, as the code that the server sends to the browser will contain all your content.
 
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The most popular news/gossip website in Finland (https://www.iltalehti.fi/) utilizes React.js and you can tell just how damn fast and snappy it is.
React is definitely not easy to learn, but the modular structure is very convenient with it's re-usability of components.
Makes it great for blogs/news style websites.
 
I’d say, use next.js instead of using react.js only. Next.js comes with ssr out of the box, and is better for seo imho.

p.s. I have used both.. so, it is coming from experience.
 
Just stick to something that you know how to use and can quickly make changes. And by how to use, I mean you know how to get results with.

If you don't know how to get results with simple HTML, then it doesn't matter what CMS you use, because you wouldn't be able to identify any true advantages for yourself outside of making websites "prettier".

If you want "pretty" websites go to Shopify or Wix lol.
 
liquardo said:
The most popular news/gossip website in Finland (https://www.iltalehti.fi/) utilizes React.js and you can tell just how damn fast and snappy it is.
React is definitely not easy to learn, but the modular structure is very convenient with it's re-usability of components.
Makes it great for blogs/news style websites.
Click to expand...
Yeah, there are already plenty of news sites built on React. Here is another example: https://www.mprnews.org/

They are incredible.
 
notNewB said:
Yeah, there are already plenty of news sites built on React. Here is another example: https://www.mprnews.org/

They are incredible.
Click to expand...
Half of the stuff won't load if you turn off javascript.

If you delve into this, you will notice that this solution has a lot of disadvantages and is more time-consuming than the classic PHP + jQuery combo.

Professional websites that are visited by large crowds of people can't have such flaws and must be easy to maintain and adjust. React clearly isn't.

My rule is that if there is no overly complicated interface, gated area etc, js frameworks are not used.

They are great for SaaS and web applications, but not websites.

I do not analyze these pages for accessibility or other aspects. Using react on a website that displays info is just overengineering.
 
reaaski said:
Half of the stuff won't load if you turn off javascript.
Click to expand...
Is there someone who actually actively surfs the net with JS disabled? (other than onion sites maybe)
That will break so many features on most sites. Definitely <1% of the visitors.
 
notNewB said:
I get amazed all the time I see a good website on React.js. Visually and technically. These react sites are so beautiful and when you click other pages, you go to that page but nothing loads. Something like this - https://www.joshwcomeau.com/

So, saying you have a brother who professionally does crypto sites, saas sites, single pages on React that doesn't really do SEO later on.

So is it a good idea to make him do a simple blog design like generatepress and start a niche site on it? Will it have any advantage over a generatepress site that you can set up in literally 3 minutes?
Click to expand...
Compared to regular HTML/CSS based web pages, React.JS (without server-side rendering at least) is slightly worse from an SEO perspective. Although, this might change in the future.

Sure, having fast, responsive website with good url structure and all is important. But the most important thing is that search engines crawl your content in the first place.

Here’s the thing, most search engines have crawlers that first look at the HTML/CSS content to index your website. With sites developed with React, most content is generated by JavaScript code. Only HTML that the crawler can immediately see is a single div tag with nothing in it.

Sure, search engines have JS renderers too, but for them it is expensive and most search engines other than google don’t bother. (At least for now.)

So, you pretty much lose all your traffic from Bing / Yahoo / Other Search Engines to your competitors who don’t use SPA’s.

In case of google, things are a bit different. Google’s crawlers are advanced enough to be able to render the JavaScript to read and index your website’s content.

But it does that in two waves.

The first wave requests source code, crawls and indexes any present HTML and CSS, adds any present links to the crawl queue and downloads page response codes.

The second wave can occur a few hours to even a few weeks later, Google returns to the page when additional resources are available to fully render and index the JS generated content.

This was revealed at a recent Google I/O.

This means client-rendered SPA’s are definitely at a disadvantage even when it comes to search giant like google. The regular HTML content is crawled much more often that the JS-based content. Which puts your site at a certain disadvantage from an SEO perspective. Just my thoughts.
 
For React, there has the framework to support SEO, that is Nextjs.
It's very good framework and popular.
 
liquardo said:
Is there someone who actually actively surfs the net with JS disabled? (other than onion sites maybe)
That will break so many features on most sites. Definitely <1% of the visitors.
Click to expand...
No sir, except entities like Bing, Yahoo and Yandex.

If you turned your blog into a SPA or something like that, you must be working in a front-end department.

A static site with proper caching is more than enough. Introducing a new tech stack just because it's cool isn't going to benefit you in any way beyond a geeky perspective.

From the marketer's perspective, all animations and fun additions on the website are only burdensome for the conversion.

Unless they help to understand a very difficult topic and make someone come back to the site, but it probably won't even be the client.
 
notNewB said:
I get amazed all the time I see a good website on React.js. Visually and technically. These react sites are so beautiful and when you click other pages, you go to that page but nothing loads. Something like this - https://www.joshwcomeau.com/

So, saying you have a brother who professionally does crypto sites, saas sites, single pages on React that doesn't really do SEO later on.

So is it a good idea to make him do a simple blog design like generatepress and start a niche site on it? Will it have any advantage over a generatepress site that you can set up in literally 3 minutes?
Click to expand...
It depends upon whether you are creating the website structure in an optimized manner like:

Having proper URL structure.
Having lightweight and fast loading speed.
Website should be responsive i.e mobile friendly.
Images should have alt tags in them.
React is lightweight and a fast JS framework so if your developer follows the SEO rules then there is no doubt that your website in React JS will be good for SEO.
 
notNewB said:
I get amazed all the time I see a good website on React.js. Visually and technically. These react sites are so beautiful and when you click other pages, you go to that page but nothing loads. Something like this - https://www.joshwcomeau.com/

So, saying you have a brother who professionally does crypto sites, saas sites, single pages on React that doesn't really do SEO later on.

So is it a good idea to make him do a simple blog design like generatepress and start a niche site on it? Will it have any advantage over a generatepress site that you can set up in literally 3 minutes?
Click to expand...
For a website to be good for SEO, depends upon the structure of how a website id built.

In early SPA, SEO was a bit difficult to manage and had to use different techniques such as pre-rendering and other things so that crawlers could read your website content.

In Case of ReactJs, server-side rendering is possible as it provides us to built an Isomorphic App and hence content can be rendered from backend which can be read by the crawlers.

Also, there are various ways to make your website SEO friendly you can find many tutorials online.
 
notNewB said:
I get amazed all the time I see a good website on React.js. Visually and technically. These react sites are so beautiful and when you click other pages, you go to that page but nothing loads. Something like this - https://www.joshwcomeau.com/

So, saying you have a brother who professionally does crypto sites, saas sites, single pages on React that doesn't really do SEO later on.

So is it a good idea to make him do a simple blog design like generatepress and start a niche site on it? Will it have any advantage over a generatepress site that you can set up in literally 3 minutes?
Click to expand...
Hello,

"Should you use React for your next SEO-project? ... But React is often a very good choice to build an SEO-friendly website as long as you set it up correctly. At Proxify we have many skilled React developers that can help you and make sure that your React site is optimized for both the user and SEO.
It's much easier to set up server-side rendering with React than with Angular – and server-side rendering is better for SEO. Therefore, Angular requires additional tools to implement SEO best practices."
 
Alina Fernandiz said:
Compared to regular HTML/CSS based web pages, React.JS (without server-side rendering at least) is slightly worse from an SEO perspective. Although, this might change in the future.

Sure, having fast, responsive website with good url structure and all is important. But the most important thing is that search engines crawl your content in the first place.

Here’s the thing, most search engines have crawlers that first look at the HTML/CSS content to index your website. With sites developed with React, most content is generated by JavaScript code. Only HTML that the crawler can immediately see is a single div tag with nothing in it.

Sure, search engines have JS renderers too, but for them it is expensive and most search engines other than google don’t bother. (At least for now.)

So, you pretty much lose all your traffic from Bing / Yahoo / Other Search Engines to your competitors who don’t use SPA’s.

In case of google, things are a bit different. Google’s crawlers are advanced enough to be able to render the JavaScript to read and index your website’s content.

But it does that in two waves.

The first wave requests source code, crawls and indexes any present HTML and CSS, adds any present links to the crawl queue and downloads page response codes.

The second wave can occur a few hours to even a few weeks later, Google returns to the page when additional resources are available to fully render and index the JS generated content.

This was revealed at a recent Google I/O.

This means client-rendered SPA’s are definitely at a disadvantage even when it comes to search giant like google. The regular HTML content is crawled much more often that the JS-based content. Which puts your site at a certain disadvantage from an SEO perspective. Just my thoughts.
Click to expand...
Great response and details, didn't think of the negative side-effects on crawlers, but makes perfect sense.
I guess you would have to use a pre-rendering library that detects a crawler in order to improve SPA crawlability and that is definitely needless hassle.
 
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