Angular Universal

Angular Universal is a technology that allows you to render an Angular application on the server and return standard HTML pages, with a number of advantages, especially in terms of SEO and social media sharing.

What is Angular Universal?

Angular Universal is a server-side rendering technology for Angular

Angular Universal is a technology that enables the server-side rendering of Angular applications. A normal Angular app is fully downloaded by the browser when any URL is requested and is then executed on the client side. Conversely, in the case of SSR, when you request an Angular app URL, the server processes and executes the code creating a static HTML version of the requested page. This is transferred to the browser, which only then loads all the client-side interactive features. This process is advantageous in a number of scenarios: it enables greater search engine optimisation (SEO), it ensures that a part of the content can be rapidly displayed, even on devices with low performance or limited bandwidth, and it facilitates integration with social networks, traffic analysis systems and user actions.

When do we use Angular Universal?

What are the advantages of server-side rendering?

It isn't always necessary to render the user interface on the server-side. In many cases, such as management or internal control software, the normal one page application, downloaded and executed entirely from the browser, is the best and highest performing option. However, if they want to expose web services to the public, the SSR pass is required. Even if Google retrieves the content loaded on the client-side in JavaScript, it doesn't necessarily mean that you'll achieve the best indexing, nor that you'll achieve the same results on other search engines. Furthermore, the presence of meta tags on the pages is essential to share content on social networks effectively. In all these cases, we opt to use Angular in conjunction with Angular Universal in order to get the most out of the application's presence on the web. We can choose to use Nuxt in Vue projects to fulfill the same requirements.