How to Implement Your Own SSR Server for Web Components

Building an Server Side Rendering (SSR) server from scratch allows understanding the mechanics behind the SSR paradigm and its possible extensions. An SSR server is essentially an HTTP server that receives a request, parses a template, and returns HTML to the client. In this article, we built an SSR server using Node.js, Nuxt, and web components, learning how to render web components on the server-side without JavaScript. We added logic to handle complex components with shadow DOM and icons, optimizing our SSR mechanism for better performance and SEO ranking. The commonality among all SSRs is a rendering function that returns an HTML string sent to the client, where some HTML is hydrated later after JavaScript loads asynchronously.