Enhancing Angular Applications: A Guide to Server-Side Rendering (SSR) and Static Site Generation (SSG)

Angular is a powerful platform for building web applications, and it offers two notable methods for rendering applications: Server-Side Rendering (SSR) and Static Site Generation (SSG). Both methods aim to improve performance, particularly in terms of load time and search engine optimization (SEO).

Server-Side Rendering (SSR) with Angular Universal

SSR generates the full HTML for a page on the server in response to navigation. This approach can improve SEO and performance, especially on mobile or low-powered devices.

How to Implement SSR in Angular:

1. Add Angular Universal to Your Project: You can add SSR capabilities to your Angular project by running:

   ng add @nguniversal/express-engine
   

   This command transforms your application into a Universal app. It adds the necessary dependencies and scripts to your package.json and creates server-side app modules.

2. Serve Your App: To serve your SSR application, use:

   npm run dev:ssr
   

   or for a production build:

   npm run build:ssr && npm run serve:ssr
   

   These commands build the application for both the server and the client, and then serve it using Node.js.

3. Optimize and Deploy: After successfully setting up SSR, you might want to optimize your application further, considering aspects like transfer state, caching strategies, and deployment options.

Discovering the book where you can known more about Angular read now

Static Site Generation (SSG) with Scully

Scully is a static site generator for Angular applications. It pre-renders your application into static HTML, allowing for fast loading times and improved SEO.

How to Implement SSG with Scully:

1. Install Scully: Add Scully to your Angular project by running:

   ng add @scullyio/init
   

   This command installs Scully and updates your project with necessary configurations.

2. Configure Routes: Scully needs to know how to handle your routes, especially dynamic ones. Configure your routes in the scully.<your-project-name>.config.ts file.

3. Generate Static Sites: To generate static files for your application, run:

   npm run scully
   

   and to serve them:

   npm run scully serve
   

   This process creates a static version of your site in the ./dist/static directory.

4. Deploy: You can deploy the static files generated by Scully to any static site hosting service like Netlify, Vercel, or GitHub Pages.

Choosing Between SSR and SSG:

• Use SSR when your content changes frequently, and you need pages to be dynamically generated per request.
• Use SSG when your content does not change often, allowing you to pre-render pages at build time for optimal performance and SEO.

Both SSR and SSG can greatly enhance the performance and SEO of your Angular applications, but the choice between them depends on your specific project needs and content update frequency.