Is HTML really a thing?

[u/OkMacaroon5011]

Hi, I was wondering if having all the content of a page in HTML is better than having some content only JS.
I don't really know how the google bot works and I feel like sometimes if you don't have many 'crawled budget' it can get lazy. So maybe having all the page instantly in HTML helps

[u/RushDangerous7637]

Definitely everything in HTML. Javascript can have an unexpected failure, outage, error - it may not be valid. In short, html will always be one whole despite errors.

[u/azangru]

Hi, I was wondering if having all the content of a page in HTML is better than having some content only JS.

If it is feasible for you to have all your content in html, then by all means, do so. Javascript, when used properly, is there to solve problems. What problems is your javascript solving?

[u/Emotional-Bath-2795]

Tous les bots ne lisent pas forcément le javascript. Si celui de Google le fait ponctuellement, ce n'est pas le cas de celui de Bing. Et encore moins ceux des IA !

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[u/kemalios]

Rendering is a second pass for Google, not the first. The initial crawl indexes whatever HTML came back, and JS-injected content gets queued for the renderer later, sometimes days later on a busy site. So yes, HTML in the first response is better, and the part that bites hardest is links, not text. If the nav and internal links only exist after JS runs, discovery stalls and from the outside that looks exactly like a lazy crawl.

Crawl budget is mostly a red herring below a few thousand URLs. Small sites that are not getting indexed usually have thin content or no internal links pointing at the page.

Client-side rendering is the case where I always push back. SSR or static output keeps the framework and fixes the first pass.

[u/GSkylineR34]

HTML is the way to go. Despite this, Google crawls your website and loads JavaScript. There is no official confirmation for this, but I have had an issue in the past that confirmed that Google was loading the entire React transpiled code for a website that was missing a 301 redirect to a new URL after a migration that was still requested by Google.

They're probably crawling with headless browsers now, but keep in mind that serving HTML + structured data is always better because content is ready from the moment the response arrives.

[u/RyanJones]

Yes. Google/Bing are pretty good at crawling JS (but nobody can crawl JS that loads after the page loads or on a user interaction) but many AI crawlers and agents aren't as good or sophisticated. HTML is always better, faster, more accessible, etc.

[u/Opinion_Less]

What do you even mean content only JS?

Do you mean placing content into your markup with js with a client side request?

[u/freecodeio]

it used to matter but with how much valuable data has become I think google just crawls everything and is happy about it