Server-Side Rendering vs Static Site Generation: Choosing the Right Strategy

The rendering strategies offered by Next.js—Server-Side Rendering (SSR), Static Site Generation (SSG), and Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR)—represent one of the most important decisions in modern web development. Each strategy offers advantages in different scenarios and directly affects your project's performance, SEO compatibility, and user experience. Choosing the right strategy is a determining factor in your application's success.

With SSR (Server-Side Rendering), each page request is rendered in real-time on the server. This approach is ideal for dynamic pages that always serve current content. E-commerce product pages, user-specific dashboards, and real-time data panels are the most suitable use cases for SSR. It also provides a major advantage for SEO since search engine bots can directly read the fully rendered HTML. However, since the server processes each request, server costs and response times need attention on high-traffic sites.

SSG (Static Site Generation) pre-generates pages at build time and serves them via CDN. This is the strategy that provides the fastest loading times and lowest server costs. Blog posts, about pages, service pages, and documentation sites are perfect candidates for SSG. SSG pages typically achieve the best scores for Core Web Vitals. The disadvantage is that content changes require a new build; however, ISR solves this problem.

ISR (Incremental Static Regeneration) combines SSG's speed with SSR's dynamism. Pages are served statically the first time but regenerated in the background when the specified revalidation period expires. This approach is the most balanced solution for frequently updated but not requiring instant currency e-commerce catalogs, news sites, and blog platforms. Interfaces developed with Tailwind CSS and ShadCN UI deliver a consistent user experience regardless of which rendering strategy you choose.

To determine the most suitable rendering strategy for your project, contact our web development services.