PageSpeed Insights: Server-side rendering or Client-side rendering?

449 views Asked by At

My website has a conditional accessing rule: if the access is being made by the Googlebot I deliver a page fully rendered by the server (server-side rendering).

Otherwise, if the access is being made by a human being I deliver a page with SPA features (client-side rendering).

My question is: In my last analysis using PageSpeed Insights (Lighthouse) I noticed that the results were based on the client-side rendering version. In this case, should I consider that the website performance result will be judged by Google by the client-side version?

I'm a little bit confused about this behavior.

Thanks :)

1

There are 1 answers

2
keul On

Lighthouse is different from googlebot, so probably you are not checking it correctly.

Did a quick check and I found this user agent string my case:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/84.0.4143.7 Safari/537.36 Chrome-Lighthouse

But in any case: don't do this. This tecnique is called cloaking and is forbidden by Google.

You risk to have you page removed form the index or heavily penalized.

You must serve to bot what you users normally access to.