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Priorities for diagnosing JavaScript-powered websites

Contributor Maria Cieslak digs into JavaScript and some of the chaos associated with it and compiles a detailed checklist you can use as a starting point for deeper analysis.

Maria Cieslak on June 12, 2018 at 5:14 pm

In the last 20 years, Google’s search engine has changed a lot. If we take a look at technology and web development as a whole, we can see the pace of change is pretty spectacular.

This website from 1998 was informative, but not very attractive or easy to use:

Modern websites not only look much better, but they are equipped with powerful features, such as push notifications, working partially offline and loading in a blink of the eye.

But if we want to be accurate, we should use the term “apps” instead of “websites,” since websites are interactive, dynamic and built with JavaScript.

JavaScript as a game-changer

For the longest time, Google couldn’t execute JavaScript, but then in 2015, the company took a giant step forward in processing JavaScript.

It needs to be stressed that the evolution of a search engine is much slower than what happens in the web development niche, which may be why Google is still the ONLY search engine which can execute JavaScript.

At the very beginning, when the World Wide Web was built with websites made up of only static hypertext markup language (HTML), Google had a simple task to complete:

Make a request to the server → get the static HTML response → index the page

I know this is a super-simple description of the process, but I want to show the differences between processing websites back when and processing websites today.

[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]

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