Google Says There Is No SEO Benefit For Either Dynamic Rendering Or Server Side Rendering

Recently Google recommended strongly against using dynamic rendering as a workaround for JavaScript sites going forward, Google updated its help documentation to strongly say not to use it. But that does not mean it would hurt your rankings, today, to use dynamic rendering compared to server-side rendering.

Google’s John Mueller responded to a question on Reddit where the person asked, “Anyone know of any case studies looking at switching from dynamic rendering to server side rendering?” Adding “This will be a heavy lift that was struck down before so I hoping to find good data.”

John responded right away by saying, “There are no SEO ranking bonuses for implementing it one way or another.” He added “they’re just different ways of making the content indexable (as is client side rendering).”

Here is the full block of what he said:

There are no SEO ranking-bonuses for implementing it one way or another – they’re just different ways of making the content indexable (as is client side rendering). The differences between dynamic rendering and server side rendering from my POV are more in terms of practical infrastructure setup & maintenance (it can also affect speed, depending on how you have things set up). There’s no rush to switch away from dynamic rendering, it’s not going to become unsupported or cause issues from Google. The change over time is just that nowadays, if you have a JS-based site, there are better options (either good CSR or SSR) available, so doing things dynamically based on the user agent is often not the most efficient approach.

If you’re doing dynamic rendering now, it’s fine to look at the options and write up the pros & cons for you, of course. I imagine most won’t be convincing for a stretched engineering team. However, if you’re planning on doing a rebuild of the site, let them know that they don’t need to spend too much time on dynamically rendering the content. At the same time, know what to watch out for too :-). This is where knowing some JS as an SEO really pays out – you don’t have to do the coding, but JS is a part of all modern websites, and it’s up to you to be able to figure out if there are issues with how it’s implemented.

So yea, if you have this all implemented today, on your next redesign, go without dynamic rendering. If you have the resources to change it out, then it might make sense to do that. Otherwise, add it to the queue and do it when you can.

Forum discussion at Reddit.