Server-Side Rendering (SSR) is an important technique for building fast, accessible, and search-engine-friendly React applications. Instead of sending an almost empty HTML document and waiting for the browser to execute JavaScript, SSR allows a server to generate HTML for a React component before sending the response to the client.

This approach can improve the initial rendering experience, especially for content-heavy websites, product pages, blogs, and dashboards that need meaningful content to appear quickly. However, SSR also introduces additional considerations around server performance, data fetching, caching, and hydration.

In this guide, we will explore how server-side rendering works, how React can generate HTML on a Node.js server, and how the browser can make that HTML interactive.…