Nowadays Web Application has totally replaced the desktop application as they are more convenient and mostly easier to use and update. Those web applications can be easily used in different devices. In Today’s time, there are two types of web applications
- Single page application and another is(SPA)
- Multiple page applications(MPA).
SPAs are considered more modern than MPAs. When deciding between a single page application and a multi-page application, it’s necessary to bear in mind your business goals and how they can be furthered with a specific development approach.
What is Single Page Applications
SPAs are all about serving an outstanding User Experience with no page reloading and no extra time waiting and this handles routing or navigation using client-side JavaScript. In other words, instead of letting browsers handle the browsing, the application code hijacks it in order to change the URL, make requests and render responses itself using JavaScript.The most common SPAs are Gmail, Google Maps, Facebook, GitHub and many more.
SPA requests the data & mark-up separately and renders pages directly in the browser. We can do this by using advanced JavaScript frameworks & libraries like Angular, React, Vue.js, Meteor.js, Knockout.js and many more. Single-page sites help keep the user in one, comfortable web space where content is presented to the user in a simple, easy and workable fashion.
Features of Single-page applications
- A Single-page applications(SPA) approach allows the user to continue consuming and interacting with the page while new elements are being updated or fetched, and can result in much faster interactions and content reloading.
- Once inside of the SPA, the application is able to dynamically fetch content from the server through AJAX requests or WebSockets.
- Single-page applications(SPA) remove the presentation layer from the server-side and put it on the client-side, in the browser.
- SPA allows the browser to keep the current page open while making requests to the server in the background to fetch additional content or new “pages” altogether.
Some famous examples of Single Page Applications are :
- Gmail
- Google Maps
- Google Drive
Advantages and Disadvantages of SPAs
Advantages of SPA
At first generally, we think about that, why we should use a single page application. Those types of applications were not so famous for years except for the last two years. Nowadays everybody developing an application on the SPA so what are the big advantages of that? There have to be at least a couple of good features right!!
1) Fast Abd Flexible
As Spa is used only on a single page, not on the entire page, they remarkably improve a website’s speed. Most resources like HTML or CSS or Scripts are only loaded once throughout the lifespan of an application. Only data is transmitted back and forth. This is the remarkable advantage that it reduces the page load speed and waiting time for users, and according to Google research, if a page takes more than 2 seconds to load it can have a potentially high impact on business and sales.
2) Continuous UX
When you build a single page web application, you get simple continuous user experience and an excellent interactive experience using parallax scrolling and marvelous transitions effects to present the complete user iteration. Coming with a clear beginning, middle, and end such apps contribute to a flawless interactive UX utilizing parallax scrolling along with different transition and animation effects.
3) Caching capabilities
A single-page app can cache any local data effectively, It can send an only single request to the server and then saves all the data it receives. After that, it can use the data without requesting data from the server and work even offline. If a user has poor connectivity, local data can be synchronized with the server when the connection allows.
4) Adaptable and Simple in Nature
Not only SPAs are easy to adapt to mobile device browsers as well as mobile app design if you wish to offer your users such along with the web version but also the development of SPA is very simple as there is no need write code to render pages on the server.this is much easy to deploy in production and even to version over time.
Disadvantages of SPA
Besides the advantages of Single-page application, Yet most of the time SPAs give users an unfamiliar, inconsistent, fragile experience. Moreover, SPA is used for only each page so, it becomes costlier as per single page design, built and test. Some Disadvantages one must know at the time of using the SPA.
1) A problem in storing Browser History
Browsers store history, So if you want to load pages as on the backward and forward way, you can do it very effectively. So in the case of SPA when a user presses the browser’s back button they expect the change happens very quickly but it doesn’t happen.
SPAs don’t reload the entire page and update the URL & resources of a web page. So it is clear that there can’t be any browsing history by which we can’t go back or forth. This means that when users click the back button, they won’t go back; a browser only takes users to the previous page, not to the previous state in an app.
2) SEO Optimization
As SEO is fully dependable on URL, Meta tags, page sessions, content & web page crawling but managing all those things in SPAs is much more complicated than traditional web apps. Since SPAs operate on JavaScript and download data on request from the client, they drastically lose in SEO optimization. Consequently, not only optimizing the site for search engines becomes a real headache but also Creating a separate dedicated server-rendered site for search engines to access is wasteful and means having to maintain two separate codebases. However, thanks to the algorithm recently launched by Google, the dynamic pages can now be indexed.
3) Difficulties in further upgradation
Technology frequently changes and comes in a new way as on time. A single-page app requires a great effort to change at every time with the changing technology on each page. You may want to find a team to develop a single page web application with experience in dealing with a certain framework and tools like NPM, Webpack, SystemJS, and Gulp., But code become hard to track at the time when you integrate the third-party elements like modules, plugins, and extensions.
4) Huge Security problem
Single-page apps are less immune to cross-site scripting attacks (XSS) and use XSS. Hackers can inject client-side scripts directly into web applications which can surely injure web apps. One security issue is the exposure of sensitive data. If developers aren’t careful about what data is contained in the initial page load, they can easily send data that shouldn’t be exposed to all users. The whole SPA is not visible to the users and that provides a false sense of security.
5) Poor link Sharing Issue
Single page application bears only a single URL address and thus creates problems at the time of sharing bigger pieces of content and content with some complex process from the development perspective.
Conclusions
Any website architecture has its own pros and cons. Choosing one as per the kind of project you have. If you fail to choose as per your need, you may approach any web development company that helps you to choose the type of web application that perfectly fits with your needs and requirement.
Like Single Page, Web Applications can be used perfectly for building dynamic web applications because the main drawback of the SPA is poor SEO optimization. So at the time of developing dynamic web apps, social networks and community platforms SEO doesn’t really matter, one can use SPA easily.
But if a project requires effective SEO then definitely Multi-Page Application is much more useful than Single-Page Application.
