A company's website was receiving low SEO health scores on its audit
The website was built with Vite, which limited crawlability
The initial website framework was not ideal for SEO. The site was built using Vite, which relies on client-side rendering (CSR). While CSR can offer fast performance for users, it poses challenges for search engines. Since most of the content is rendered in the browser via JavaScript, search engine crawlers often miss or delay indexing important content. This limits visibility in search results, regardless of how useful or high-quality the content may be.
Search engines prefer websites that are easy to crawl and index
SEO ideally benefits from server-side rendering (SSR) or static site generation (SSG), where content is pre-rendered and available as fully-formed HTML when crawlers arrive. These approaches give search engines immediate access to page content, improving both crawlability and indexation.
The website was migrated to Next.js to improve crawlability
To address this, we migrated the site from Vite to Next.js. Next.js offers a hybrid rendering model, combining SSR, SSG, and CSR where appropriate. This flexibility allowed us to optimize SEO-critical pages with SSR while still maintaining performance elsewhere. While a pure HTML static site might offer the best crawlability, it comes at the cost of flexibility and developer experience — trade-offs we weren’t willing to make.
The website's SEO health score improved dramatically
After the migration, the site's SEO health score on Ahrefs improved significantly, jumping from 55 to 93. Search engines were now able to consistently index key pages, and visibility in organic search began to improve.
Conclusion: The web framework chosen for your website is a key factor in SEO
The takeaway is simple: your web framework matters for SEO. If you’re unsure why your site isn’t ranking as expected, it’s worth checking whether your current setup uses CSR, SSR, or some hybrid. The way your pages are rendered can have a bigger impact than you think.