SarPayLann is a well-known book publisher in my country with a lot of best-selling books in local market. The problem is although the site already has good sales channels (via Facebook), it doesn’t shows up on book name searches on Google. Because that was a React SPA site with no SSR.

Things we did so far

we are focusing on these ticks.

Use SSR Provided by react-router

This is the most important thing that make SEO possible for the site. Previously, our site just returned <div id="app"></div> as it was a SPA.

Semantic HTML and Accessibility Update

Basically we used Lighthouse and a Chrome extension called “axe DevTools”. We run those scans and just updated according to suggestions. The site has now near perfect accessibility scores.

Use Cloudflare Pages instead of Vercel for Front-end Hosting

This is obviously not related to SEO. It is just because of Vercel free plan’s limitation. We cannot deploy contributor’s PRs from GitHub as Vercel only allow that on paid plans. So we decided to move to Pages.

Added Analytic Tracking

I think stats are crucial for us to track whether we are doing SEO well or not. As we already know, data is key. Also we need to track which pages (books) are mostly visited. We added Vercel Analytics first but as we moved away from there, I am planning to use Plausible (maybe self-hosted community version) or OpenPanel. The latter is a newer one but looks promising.

ℹ️ Optimization is still in progress and we haven’t connected the new site to the main domain. We will update the article soon after we finalized. We will include before and after stats too. Stay tuned 👋