Which Rendering Strategy?: Explained

Which Rendering Strategy? Explained

Answer a few questions about how often content changes, whether SEO matters, whether pages are public or personalized, and where you can afford compute to choose between Static Site Generation, Incremental Static Regeneration, Server-Side Rendering, and Client-Side Rendering.

A rendering strategy decides when HTML is produced: once at build time, on a schedule, on every request, or in the browser on demand. Three forces pull against each other: freshness (how new the content must be), reach (SEO and first paint), and cost (where compute runs). The answers below turn that trade-off into a recommendation, ranked against the alternatives.

Decision guide · 4 options

The options

Static Site Generation (SSG)

HTML is generated once at build time and served as flat files.

Public content that rarely changes: marketing sites, docs, blogs. Fastest possible first paint, cheap to host, and trivially cacheable at the edge.

Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR)

Static pages that rebuild on a timer or on demand in the background.

Content that changes periodically but not per request: a catalog or a news site, where you want static speed with auto-refreshing data.

Server-Side Rendering (SSR)

Fresh HTML is produced on the server for every request.

Per-request, personalized, or always-fresh pages where a stale cached copy is wrong, and you have an origin that can render on demand.

Client-Side Rendering (CSR)

A thin HTML shell loads, then JavaScript renders everything in the browser.

Highly interactive apps behind a login, where SEO does not matter and the server's only job is to ship assets.

Which one fits you?

Answer a few questions to get a recommendation.

Question 1 of 4