Our next learning was that while Google at the time began saying, "we crawl Javascript rendered content", our experiments and data suggested otherwise. While they did seem to crawl some Javascript content, they clearly were missing most of it. ShopStyle has millions of web pages and Google's Javascript enabled bot was simply not crawling fast enough.

Solution: pre-rendering

We needed a way to render content server side using Angular, and to be able to do it fast. No off the shelf solution existed at the time, so to solve this we created a framework called Compylr that transpiled browser-only Angular templates to Handlebars - which can render on the server, very fast.

In order to support this, we did something that was discouraged at the time - we made one large state tree, that could easily be constructed on the client or the server, to pass to the Angular or Handlebars template. Ironically, this has become the best practice as of recently with frameworks like Redux becoming the go-to choice for single global tree state management.