Are Single Page Applications here to solve our poor web performance woes? SPAs gained traction a while ago but, in a way, failed to deliver on its near-instant experiences promise.

In some cases, SPAs can bring speed improvements (as portrayed below). But there are also a lot of caveats to their success. When rendering everything client-side, we’re putting the burden of downloading and parse of usually significant assets on the end-user. Their hardware will dramatically influence the user experience, making it more volatile and harder to optimise.

Secondly, building a fast SPA is not an easy feat. You have to execute well not only on the architecture and implementation part but also ensure a fast API, database, efficient caching, and delivery. If even one area is not optimised, page speed starts falling apart.

We want clear-cut answers, but what we get is an engineering puzzle.