The next step to building React applications is about learning how the server-side rendering works and what benefits it can give us. The universal applications are better for SEO, and they enable knowledge sharing between the frontend and the backend. They can also improve the perceived speed of a web application, which usually leads to increased conversions. However, applying server-side rendering to a React application comes with a cost, and we should think carefully about whether we need it or not.

In this chapter, you will see how to set up a server-side rendered application, and by the end of the relevant sections, you will be able to build a universal application and understand the pros and the cons of the technique.

In this chapter, we will cover the following:

• Understanding what a universal application is
• Figuring out the reasons why we may want to enable server-side rendering
• Creating a simple static server-side rendered application with React
• Adding data fetching to server-side rendering and understanding concepts such as dehydration/hydration
• Using Next.js by Zeith to easily create a React application that runs on both the server and the client