Introduction

The Website Project Application

The Website project application represents your public website.

In terms of the code the application holds, essentially, we’re talking about a classic React application that renders pages created using the Page Builder application.

In terms of the necessary cloud infrastructure, things are not as simple as it’s the case with the Admin Area project application. Basically, public websites do not work well if they are served as a classic React single-page-application (SPA) that’s relying on the client-side rendering approach.

This is because of the following two factors:

1. UX is not good because every time a users open a webpage, they are presented with a loading screen.
2. SEO suffers significantly. Search engines and web crawlers are still having problems interpreting the dynamically generated HTML, and some are not supporting this at all.

Because of this, Webiny developed its own Prerendering Service, which prerenders your website pages. In other words, when a page is published, it captures the complete HTML code, and relevant data for it in advance. And, when an actual website visitors visits one of your pages, the page is just served as a simple static HTML file, with the page data directly embedded in it. This approach resolves both of the issues mentioned above.

So, the cloud infrastructure contains additional resources and it also depends on the API project application, which hosts the mentioned Prerendering service and which coordinates the complete prerendering process. All this, and more, is examined in the following topics.