React SEO: Best Way To Enhance Your Web Development Solution

Declarative and cross-platform interactive user interfaces are the reason behind leveraging React Development. 

ReactJS is currently one of the highly recommended JavaScript frameworks for creating enticing front-end apps. 

React was created for building Single-Page Applications (SPAs) but with time it gained importance in building complete websites and mobile applications efficiently. React SEO issues are brought on by the same elements and traits that make it successful. 

 
If you are a seasoned React developer pro at traditional web development, you’ll find that more and more of your HTML and CSS code is being converted to JavaScript. 

This is so that React may recommend expressing the “state” of the UI rather than immediately generating or changing UI elements. The DOM will then be updated by React most effectively to match the state. 

As a result, React’s engine is required for all UI and DOM updates. Even while it’s convenient for developers, this could result in slower page loads for users and more work for search engines to identify and index the information. This could have an impact on SEO for React web pages. 

Before dealing with SEO issues in React, let’s first understand what ReactJS is to enhance web development. 

What is React? 

Facebook (now Meta) developed the open-source React, the first choice for web application development. React’s key advantages include its declarative, simple DOM manipulation, and component-based architecture.  

 4.1% of websites whose JavaScript library we are aware of utilize React. 2.2% of all websites among the top 1,000,000 websites’ JavaScript libraries also use React for web development. 

Read on to learn what React.js SEO entails and what are the ways to resolve typical challenges while perfecting SEO.  

What are the Benefits of Using React for Web Development? 

Component-based architecture 

ReactJS follows the component-based architecture, where a UI is broken down into smaller individual pieces which are developed independently and together, they form the UI. 

This approach makes web development more manageable, and each component can be used at multiple places around the project.  

Superfast rendering with Virtual DOM 

Virtual DOM is one of the flagship features of the ReactJS framework. It was one of the first frontend frameworks to introduce such a mechanism. 

While working with ReactJS, the framework keeps two copies of browser DOM, one is the original one which is rendered, and the other is a copy for reference.   

JSX 

When using ReactJS for building effective apps, there is no need for any separate HTML files. 

Instead, ReactJS has introduced a new way of writing HTML in apps, which is JSX. With this approach, developers can directly write HTML code in JavaScript files, and the framework will render that as HTML elements on a page. 

SEO-friendly 

Being SEO-friendly is vital for every business especially in web development. SEO helps you to rank higher in the search engine results pages and drives organic traffic to your website. 

If you are struggling to rank your products higher on the search engine results, visitors may find it difficult to reach out to your site. But ReactJS holds that expertise to resolve this problem. 

SEO scores rely on the page content, load time and rendering significantly. With React, you will have minimal page load times, and the subsequent loads will also happen very quickly due to the virtual DOM and other performance improvements in React. This combination will help you in SEO Content optimization, create better customer experience and offer them easy navigation through the web pages.  

Easy to Learn 

Anyone with a knack for learning programming and understanding JavaScript concepts can understand React. Learning React is relatively easy especially for web development, and there are fantastic tutorials and documentation that can be referred to in the process.  

Reusable components and libraries 

As React follows a component-based architecture, which is like creating classes that can be used repeatedly, reusable components are common in this library. 

It allows developers to use the same components across projects with minimal changes and boosts productivity significantly. As components are reused, they can also speed up web development time, without having to create everything from scratch again.  

Community Support 

React is one of the most popular frontend frameworks based on JavaScript, and it is natural to have more community support in your web development journey. The library is loved by many, and some open-source developers support it by creating new helper libraries and modules to increase the popularity of this framework. Moreover, there is a lot of self-help material available for this library, with the community being always active across discussion platforms. 

Easy to Test 

React apps are easy to test, and the tests can be automated. With standard JavaScript testing libraries, you can write unit, functional, and integration tests for your React apps and run them whenever to get the best results. 

As these tests are automated, you will spend less time running the tests, and the chances of human errors are also decreased significantly, making the best efficiency in the web development process.  

What are the Common SEO Issues using React? 

You will undoubtedly encounter several problems that make the process less than ideal when working on your SEO for web development with React. The following unique problems with React SEO are expected because of React’s quirks: 

Slow and complex indexing 

To execute the relevant JavaScript, Googlebot first obtains the HTML data from the webpage and queues it for later. This increases the time it takes to index the relevant web pages, which lowers the SEO ranking of your website. 

Handling of JavaScript errors 

HTML and JavaScript have distinctly different ways of handling rendering issues. A single error in the JavaScript parser can lead to unsuccessful indexing because of how poorly it handles errors. 

This is so that JavaScript will not continue to run if the parser discovers an error while it is being executed.  

Googlebot will index the webpage as a blank page if this happens while it is indexing.  

Exhausted crawling budget 

Due to the server-intensive nature of crawling, Googlebot has a predetermined budget for each crawl. It lists the web pages that Googlebot may access in a certain period. 

 Googlebot’s crawling budget may run out if it must wait an excessive amount of time for JavaScript to execute on React web pages. Without indexing the disputed page, it will go on to the following domain or pages. 

Indexing of SPAs 

Single-page applications (SPAs) that are quick, responsive, and dynamically produced can be made with React. These apps only load one page at a time, and all further content is in response to user input.  

However, SPAs face major SEO issues. SPAs can only display their entire content once the loading process is complete. Googlebot will encounter an empty page if it crawls it before the content is fully loaded. A significant portion of the website won’t be indexed, which will lower your site’s SEO rating. 

What are the Ways to Optimize React Websites for SEO? 

Now, you understand how React works with search engine bots and some of the resources available for web development to raise SEO rankings. 

We can now delve further into the precise steps to improve the SEO friendliness of the React website. 

Pre-rendering 

Pre-rendering is a method you should take into account if you want to quickly boost the SEO of your website. 

It is the process of intercepting bot crawling requests and sending a static page that has been pre-rendered from a cached version of your website’s HTML code. Pre-renderers load your page regularly if a user rather than a bot makes the request. 

 
Pre-rendering is largely useful in the following aspects for better website indexing: 

• Compatible with the latest web features. 
• They can handle modern JavaScript and transform into static HTML. 
• Minimal or else no changes are required to the codebase. 

Server-Side Rendering (SSR) 

Googlebot may crawl your website from its HTML document if you employ server-side rendering. This is so that SSR may send the client all of the webpage content included in the HTML file from the server.  

Rendering on the server is one of the fantastic ReactJS Performance Optimization techniques to improve your SEO performance. You must add a layer of Next.js for SPAs, which we’ll cover in the following section. 

Building static or dynamic web apps 

Server-side rendering is a natural feature of static and dynamic web applications for web development, making it simpler for crawlers like Googlebot to index web pages. Even if SPAs have more content and can provide a better user experience, static and dynamic web apps still have a lot of potential. 

 A JavaScript framework called Next.js makes it easier to build static web apps. It also functions well with large SPAs. Dynamic applications are highly suited to websites like marketplaces, whereas static apps work well for creating landing pages. Additionally, Next.js still allows you to use SSR for your SPAs.  

Avoiding hashed URLs 

Although it might not be a serious problem, it is advised to avoid hashed URLs. Here are a few instances of hashed URLs: 

• https://buymgp.com/#/shop 
• https://buymgp.com/#/contact 
• https://buymgp.com/#/about 

The problem with using these kinds of URLs is that Google can’t see anything that comes after the hash. The URL for each page, as mentioned above, should be https://buymgp.com/. 

 SPAs with client-side routing can alter these pages by implementing the History API. You can achieve this quickly with the help of Next.js and React Router. 

Using href links  

Using <div> or <button> components in place of <href> is another error made while altering URLs in SPAs. This is more of a usage issue than a React-specific one.

Your SEO ranking may be impacted by this practice. When Googlebot scans a URL, it searches the <href> elements for further URLs to crawl. It won’t even attempt to crawl the URLs if it can’t discover the <href> element. Therefore, on your website, provide <href> links to any URLs you want Google to find. 

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Conclusion 

While honing your SEO with React, there are many more factors to consider, but don’t overlook some fundamentals that hold true. Professionals with experience and training should incorporate SEO best practices, including mobile-first web development, XML sitemaps, semantic HTML, and others.