: When to render/build my html that changes frequently? I am building a simple website that will display some information. This information can be retreived from a third-party service and changes

@Steve110

Using file_get_contents to retrieve the page and file_put_contents with an expiry to store the page can do what you are requesting in PHP language.

You can use Javascript or AJAX to render the page from the remote server. But you should note that Google doesn't tend to count Javascript code on your page as content. And so any content that is rendered in Javascript is likely not to help you rank in the search results.

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@Harper822

This information can be retrieved from a third-party service and changes on average a couple of days.


Since you know this info, you may want to perform your checks at that rate at most (once every couple of days). The best time to have such checks done are at the time where there will not likely be many guests on your site. This will minimize the amount of site-wide slowdowns.


What if the data is changing much more frequently?


Let it change but you have to consider the fact that when you're constantly fetching data from another server, you're putting a strain on their server, especially if you're trying to be a foreign bot who fetches a webpage once a second. I'd recommend not checking the site more than a few times a day and if your guests are anxious, consider adding a message to your site while letting them know when the next update will occur.

and do understand that scraping content from another website and trying to make it your own can get you in trouble with search engines because then you're asking for duplicate content to be indexed on the web.


Option 1 puts all the work on my server. Whereas option 2 makes the client browser to fetch the information. Which option should be preferred and on which cases?


Option 1 wins. In fact, use a server-side scripting language such as PHP to do all the back-end work and have it generate the HTML as well. On top of that, you can make the output compatible with all web browsers including new and old ones.

If you choose Option 2, then you're restricting full access to content to guests who have a powerful enough processor with the correct version of Javascript turned on in their web browsers. And if your code is too heavy in Javascript with too many new functions and/or unoptimized code, then it could slow down a guest's computer system.

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