I’m a single person and my regular sized dishwasher runs 1-2 times a week. I use a lot of bowls while cooking and containers for leftovers and stuff. Pots fill the lower floor up pretty quickly. Pans, knifes and anything wooden I wash by hand. I could live with a smaller dishwasher but then it would run even more frequently. I can’t imagine a life without one.

It does make sense when you mix. You get the benefit of instant rendering and dynamic content all in one. And web dev becomes even more complicated…

There is no latency on static pages. They are rendered once as regular HTML and then saved on the server to be immediately ready for the user. The server is only processing that initial data fetching and rendering once per site. If needed, it can be retriggered. This is great for blogs and other regular pages.

Server pages on the other hand will do the initial fetch request every time but once the site is there, no data is missing and everything is there. It’s not for everyone. Regular dynamic pages still make sense. For every method there are use cases.

Disclaimer: I’m speaking from my experience with Next.js which did the same thing long before and React now aims to make that easier. But I’m not sure if React has the distinction between static and server. It’s all new and I haven’t had a project to test it on yet.

It’s called Server Components. If you actually build a fully static website, there is no DOM modification going on. I would actually not recommend doing that with React because it kinda defeats the purpose. The goal of it is to have a mix of both. The initial render is super fast because it is prerendered once for everyone. Then dynamic data is being fetched if needed and elements are replaced. It also improves SEO.

React 19 is not yet officially released but you can read more about it here https://react.dev/blog/2024/04/25/react-19

I’m a React dev. You can create server side websites, written in JS, that don’t require JS to be turned on in the browser. Granted, this just became a new official feature in React but has already been available with React frameworks like NextJS