Following the emergence of modern JS libraries in the early 2010s, server-side rendering was pushed back from being a primary concern in many web applications to no longer existing as a product requirement. In this talk, I’ll explore the decisions that pushed server-side rendering to the backburner, and the reasons that many development teams are revisiting this capability. Today teams can add in server-side rendering to their web applications for little additional cost, while gaining a huge amount of flexibility in how they speed up and simplify their applications. I’ll walk through some learnings my 300-person team has faced in converting a complex web application with millions of lines each of PHP and JavaScript to using server-side-rendered React. Attendees will also walk away with exposure to some of the wonderful modern tools now available to enable these capabilities.