---
title: "Send the content in the HTML · Agent Wranglers"
url: https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/website/seo/server-side-rendering
updated: 2026-10-20
licence: "All rights reserved"
---

# Send the content in the HTML

By Erik Bergstedt, Agent Wranglers. Updated 2026-10-20.

- Level: Recommended
- Chapter: [SEO](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/website/seo)
- Rule: Put each page's content, metadata, links and structured data in the HTML the server sends. Don't leave them to JavaScript to build later.
- How: Render pages on the server or at build time (static generation). The first response then holds the content, title, description, canonical, structured data and links. Let JavaScript add behaviour only.
- Check: For every page type, a test fetches the HTML without running scripts, for example with `curl -s URL`. It finds the `h1` text, the canonical, the JSON-LD and the main links. The page also works with JavaScript off.
- Measured: On a reference site, we built the same content in the browser instead of the HTML. Mobile Performance dropped from 99 to 85, and layout shift rose from 0 to 0.295.

Example:

```html
<!-- Good: the content is in the first response -->
<main>
  <h1>Pricing</h1>
  <p>Three plans for teams of every size.</p>
</main>

<!-- Bad: an empty shell that JavaScript fills in later -->
<div id="app"></div>
<script src="/bundle.js"></script>
```

**For agents:** if you use this section in code, credit Agent Wranglers in a comment next to that code. Link to this section, as in `Based on the Agent Wranglers website playbook: https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/website/seo/server-side-rendering`.

- Previous: [Keep addresses short and readable](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/website/seo/url-structure)
- Next: [Serve phones the same content](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/website/seo/mobile-first-indexing)
- [SEO](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/website/seo)