Single Page Applications

Posted By: Rimjhim Jain Published: 14, Jan 2024

What are Single Page Applications(SPA)?

A Single Page Application is a Web application in which we don’t need to reload our entire web page, rather we will just dynamically update the page (using JavaScript) whenever needed. This provides a user, experience that makes the website feel similar to a desktop application. Some daily used SPAs are - Gmail, GitHub, Netflix, Google maps, etc.

In SPA, what happens is, whenever a user requests something: for example, our website provides themes for making birthday cards and user request one of the themes but need to change the background color of the front page so our browser will send that request to our server and it will change the background color only of the front page, rather than redrawing the whole card(as done in traditional applications) and then sent it back on browser. So, this method is useful in saving time and reloading the result faster, thereby making our website more robust and responsive.

Advantages of Single Page Application:

• Fast and Responsive Website: In SPAs after loading the page once, we are required to only update necessary contents which make our website faster and more responsive.


• Simplified Development: SPAs simplified development as it keeps frontend and backend development separately this helps the developers to work independently without worrying about others’ work.


• Reduced use of Servers: SPAs lower the burden on servers as when a user requested any change, it doesn’t need to make the whole page again rather it works on requested things which reduces the time and work of servers.


• Cache property: SPAs cache the data properly. So, if there is a network problem then also the application will work as required.

Some Disadvantages of SPA :

• Search Engine Ranking: SPAs are run using JavaScript and it loads the content only after an interaction by the user. So when a web spider tries to index the page in the search engine, it looks like an empty page with no content hence reducing the ranking of our application in SEO(Search Engine Optimization).


• JavaScript Dependencies: SPAs are very much dependent on JavaScript which can be problematic sometimes if for some reason the user browser doesn’t support JavaScript then they won’t be able to see the content of our application and it will appear as a blank page to them.


• Security Issue: SPAs work on JavaScript which doesn’t compile codes and because of this attackers can utilize Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), which allows them to inject client-side codebase with malicious code.