Server-side rendering (SSR) is an important aspect of modern web development that can significantly improve website performance and user experience. In this article, we will explore how to implement SSR using Immer and Gatsby, a popular static site generator.

What is Immer?

Immer is a JavaScript library that simplifies immutability management by allowing you to work with immutable data structures in a more intuitive way. It provides a simple and concise API to create and modify immutable objects, making it easier to write and reason about your code.

What is Gatsby?

Gatsby is a blazing-fast static site generator built on React. It allows you to create SEO-friendly and performant websites by pre-rendering your content during the build process. Gatsby also supports server-side rendering, which enables you to fetch data from external sources and dynamically render pages on the server.

Benefits of SSR

Implementing SSR with Gatsby offers several benefits:

• Improved performance: SSR allows your website to send fully-rendered HTML to the client, reducing the time needed to initially load the page.

• SEO-friendliness: By pre-rendering content on the server, search engines can easily crawl and index your website’s pages, improving their visibility on search engine result pages.

• Enhanced user experience: SSR ensures that users can view the content of your website even if JavaScript is disabled in their browsers.

Implementing SSR with Immer and Gatsby

1. Install the required dependencies by running the following command:

npm install gatsby-plugin-react-helmet react-helmet immer

1. Create a new file gatsby-ssr.js in the root of your Gatsby project and add the following code:

import React from 'react';
import { Provider } from 'react-redux';
import { createStore } from 'redux';
import rootReducer from './src/reducers';
import { HelmetProvider } from 'react-helmet-async';

export const wrapRootElement = ({ element }) => {
  const store = createStore(rootReducer);

  return (
    <Provider store={store}>
      <HelmetProvider>{element}</HelmetProvider>
    </Provider>
  );
};

1. Replace './src/reducers' with the path to your Redux root reducer. If you’re not using Redux, you can remove the Provider component and related code.

2. Enable server-side rendering in your Gatsby configuration file (gatsby-config.js) by adding the following code:

module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    'gatsby-plugin-react-helmet',
    {
      resolve: `gatsby-plugin-react-redux`,
      options: {
        pathToCreateStoreModule: './gatsby-ssr',
      },
    },
  ],
};

1. Lastly, remove any client-side rendering dependencies in your components and replace them with Immer code. Immer simplifies the immutability management of your state by allowing you to apply modifications in a more intuitive way. For example:

import produce from 'immer';

const initialState = {
  todos: [],
};

const reducer = (state = initialState, action) => {
  switch (action.type) {
    case 'ADD_TODO':
      return produce(state, (draft) => {
        draft.todos.push(action.payload);
      });

    // other cases...

    default:
      return state;
  }
};

Conclusion

Implementing server-side rendering (SSR) with Immer and Gatsby allows you to improve the performance and SEO-friendliness of your website. By leveraging Immer’s intuitive API and Gatsby’s SSR capabilities, you can create blazing-fast and SEO-friendly websites that provide a great user experience.

#WebDevelopment #ServerSideRendering