Single Page Applications, once a solution for slow browsers, are now a performance bottleneck due to multiple HTTP round-trips.

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Single Page Applications (SPAs) have become a performance bottleneck despite their original purpose of improving user experience. While SPAs were designed to solve problems with slow browsers and unreliable networks in the early 2000s, they now suffer from structural performance issues due to requiring multiple HTTP round-trips to assemble page fragments. This creates head-of-line blocking, waterfall request patterns, and complex client-side state management. Server-side rendering approaches, like Stack Overflow's sub-50ms HTML delivery using Razor, demonstrate superior performance and user experience by delivering complete pages in a single request and leveraging server-side caching. The architectural choice of SPAs fundamentally limits optimization potential, making it difficult for even major platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn to achieve fast page loads.

SPAs Are a Performance Dead End

this feels like a clickbaity article, “I am cool because I can write sh** about SPA” kind of article
or more like “this bad, I know what good, but I won’t tell you why it’s good in details, because I only want clicks”
where did you come up with your data, which frameworks/libraries have you been using that you can come up with this statement?
how many years in frontend development do you have that you can say from experience that SPAs are essentially “bad”?

✅ This post was sponsored by Server-Side Components.
You sound like you’re on the payroll of Next.js.

I won’t even read your article will just say your wrong, it depends on how you engineer your SPA and all that, considering even the most use of SPA is for dashboards and web applications not websites and therefore its data fetching heavy and more to give application experience not all about just feeling snappy, now what will cache for a real time data dashboard? Or can i tell you there a couple of techniques you can blend in, islands, ISR, partial rendering and so on? Or do you know that browsers have caching or PWA can be added? I am not even gonna read the article but am going to say it depends, SSR or SPA a.k.a CSR depends on the kind of app your building and how your building it, else its just skill issues!

Thank you Yegor, my hero! The act of mentioning the existence of an HTML-HTTP Request, has enraged everyone who only uses JSON-HTTP Requests. They are so angry, every commenter is demanding data sources as evidence for your claims. They could simply use Chrome/Firefox Dev Tools to see that a Hybrid Strategy is required. Yegor my friend, you have started a war, by simply speaking the truth about Hybrid Architectures. Thank you again Yegor!

SPA’s are nice for server bill, cdn goes BRR