SSR vs SSG vs ISR vs CSR – What’s the Difference?

Ahmed Nail Al Drabea - Feb 23 - - Dev Community

If you’re building for the web, understanding how pages are rendered can make or break your app’s performance! Here’s a quick & simple breakdown of the four major rendering strategies:

SSR (Server-Side Rendering)

  • The page is generated on the server for every request and sent as HTML.
  • Great for dynamic data & SEO (e.g., dashboards, user profiles).
  • Can be slower since it waits for the server on every request.

SSG (Static Site Generation)

  • The page is pre-built at deploy time and served as static HTML.
  • Blazing fast & great for SEO (e.g., blogs, landing pages).
  • Data is fixed until the site is rebuilt.

ISR (Incremental Static Regeneration)

  • Hybrid approach: Pre-build pages like SSG but regenerate them in the background when needed.
  • Best of both worlds: Fast, SEO-friendly, and supports dynamic updates (e.g., product listings, news sites).
  • Requires defining a revalidation time.

  • CSR (Client-Side Rendering)

  • The browser loads a barebones HTML and fetches data via JavaScript.

  • Ideal for single-page apps (SPAs) with a smooth user experience.

  • Bad for SEO if not handled properly.

Recommendations:
Try to use ISR [ Incremental Side Regeneration ] :

  • because it will provide a dynamic way to handle data after each change without giving a full rebuild for all of the project pages, which will just re-render the component or page after each change.
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