# Client-side rendering

URL: https://xodia.ai/glossary/client-side-rendering
Description: What client-side rendering is, why a client-only React app can be hard for search engines and AI tools to read, and how Xodia ships every page as real HTML.
Last updated: 2026-11-10

Client-side rendering builds a web page in the visitor's browser with JavaScript, so the HTML the server sends is almost empty until the script has run.

How Xodia avoids its SEO cost: sites made from the Xodia template are still React apps in the browser, but every page is also built as real HTML ahead of time, so crawlers read the content without running JavaScript.

Updated November 10, 2026

## What it is

In a client-only app, the server sends one HTML file with an empty root element and a script. The browser downloads and runs the script, which draws the page. It makes moving between pages fast, and it is how a plain React app on Vite starts out.

The cost is the first view. Search engines that run JavaScript render the page later and not always, and many other crawlers, AI tools and link previews read only the HTML, so they find no title, no text and no links. Prerendering and server rendering fix this by putting the content in the HTML.

## In Xodia

Sites made from the Xodia template render in the browser like any React app, and their build also writes each page's finished HTML, so crawlers and link previews get the content. Xodia hosting does the same for every site it hosts, imported React sites included.

An imported site deployed by your own host ships as its own build makes it. If that build is client-only, search engines get mostly empty pages from it.

## Read more

- [SEO for React sites: real HTML on every page](https://xodia.ai/product/seo#full-html)
- [Vite and React](https://xodia.ai/frameworks/vite-react)

## Related terms

- [Prerendering Prerendering builds a page's HTML ahead of time, at build time, so the content is in the page when it loads instead of being drawn later by JavaScript.](https://xodia.ai/glossary/prerendering)
- [Open Graph Open Graph is a set of meta tags, such as og:title, og:description and og:image, that decides the title, text and picture shown when a page is shared in social media and chats.](https://xodia.ai/glossary/open-graph)
- [Structured data Structured data is machine-readable information about a page, usually JSON-LD in the schema.org vocabulary, that tells search engines and AI tools what the page is about.](https://xodia.ai/glossary/structured-data)

[See every term in the glossary](https://xodia.ai/glossary)

Glossary