Skip to content

View source to confirm SSR is working in Next.js

How to check if SSR is working in your Next.js app

AI workshop

join cohort #1

Do you have set up your new Next.js application? Great!

Let’s now check the application is working as we expect it to work. It’s a Next.js app, so it should be server side rendered.

It’s one of the main selling points of Next.js: if we create a site using Next.js, the site pages are rendered on the server, which delivers HTML to the browser.

This has 3 major benefits:

Let’s view the source of the app. Using Chrome you can right-click anywhere in the page, and press View Page Source.

If you view the source of the page, you’ll see the <div><h1>Airbnb clone</h1></div> snippet in the HTML body, along with a bunch of JavaScript files - the app bundles.

We don’t need to set up anything, SSR (server-side rendering) is already working for us.

The React app will be launched on the client, and will be the one powering interactions like clicking a link, using client-side rendering. But reloading a page will re-load it from the server. And using Next.js there should be no difference in the result inside the browser - a server-rendered page should look exactly like a client-rendered page.


→ Get my Next.js (pages router) Handbook

I wrote 20 books to help you become a better developer:

  • Astro Handbook
  • HTML Handbook
  • Next.js Pages Router Handbook
  • Alpine.js Handbook
  • HTMX Handbook
  • TypeScript Handbook
  • React Handbook
  • SQL Handbook
  • Git Cheat Sheet
  • Laravel Handbook
  • Express Handbook
  • Swift Handbook
  • Go Handbook
  • PHP Handbook
  • Python Handbook
  • Linux Commands Handbook
  • C Handbook
  • JavaScript Handbook
  • CSS Handbook
  • Node.js Handbook
...download them all now!

Related posts that talk about next: