SSR where it earns its keep

Server-side rendering is easy to adopt as ideology and hard to adopt as engineering. We did not SSR everything — we SSR’d the routes where first paint and SEO actually moved the business needle.

Selective migration

Critical trading flows and discovery pages got the SSR treatment first. Authenticated, highly dynamic screens stayed on the client-rendered path until we had a reason to change them.

The custom React-based SSR framework existed to fit our deployment and data-loading constraints — not to invent a framework for its own sake. The measured result: roughly 30–35% improvement in first-load performance on migrated routes, plus better crawlability for public surfaces.

What we optimized for

1. Time to meaningful content on first visit
2. Predictable caching at the edge for public pages
3. A migration path so teams could move routes without a big-bang rewrite

Performance work that does not change a user-visible metric is theater. We tied the SSR investment to load metrics and access speed for the flows that matter at market open.