Why Flutter Web Might Not Be as Bad For SEO as You Think

Flutter, Google's UI toolkit for building natively compiled apps for desktop, web, and mobile from a shared codebase, changed the paradigm of development. When Flutter Web first launched, it was seriously questioned, particularly about its capability to rival SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Web developers and SEO professionals wondered if it ever had a chance of being a serious contender in search results, given the fact that it's JavaScript-based and was plagued by early performance problems. But since the development has gotten better, so to speak, the problems, Flutter Web couldn't have been so bad for SEO after all. Let us talk about ways of making Flutter Web SEO-friendly. The Original Misgivings about Flutter Web and SEO

Flutter SEO Mistakes to Avoid are as follows:

• JavaScript Rendering: Traditional SEO best practices have been centered on server-side rendering (SSR) as a method of enabling search engines to spider and index content effectively. Since Flutter Web is primarily JavaScript-based, most were concerned that search engine spiders like Googlebot would be slow and inefficient in indexing JavaScript-rendered content.
• Big Bundle Sizes: Flutter Web apps are known to produce enormous JavaScript bundles, and this could be the reason why the load times could be slow. Page speed is a significant Google ranking factor, and large bundles can affect page load speeds, which adversely affect SEO performance.
• Accessibility Problems: Flutter Web was not originally designed for all the devices and users, and this led to accessibility problems. A bad user experience can lead to higher bounce rates, and indirectly, this affects the SEO rankings.
• Indexability of Dynamic Content: Flutter Web as an SPA pattern implies content is dynamically loaded every time users tap the app. It becomes difficult for regular search engines to index the dynamically loaded content unless with special treatment or pre-rendering techniques.

There are, of course, some challenges, and Flutter Web is working to overcome them one by one to make Flutter Web SEO-friendly. Here's why Flutter Web is superior for the better:

1. Improved JavaScript Rendering & Googlebot Crawling

One of the largest myths surrounding Flutter Web is that Googlebot cannot crawl and index JavaScript websites. Although it is a fact that older search engines were struggling to deal with JavaScript-heavy sites, Google has taken humongous strides in rendering and indexing JavaScript over the past few years. Googlebot now supports JavaScript rendering completely, and what this implies is that it can read and index content created using frameworks like Flutter Web. Also, Google has been transitioning towards a mobile-first index where it crawls primarily mobile-friendly pages, making Flutter Web SEO-friendly. Flutter Web is natively responsive and friendly, and hence, provided you organize your Flutter app in the best practices, it will perform really well in search engine rankings. Also, modern JavaScript frameworks (e.g., Flutter Web) support specifying and controlling when to render content so that Googlebot will find and crawl content with ease.

2. Server-Side Rendering Support in Flutter Web

Even though Hybrid app development with Flutter was never initially intended to be able to accomplish server-side rendering, it has now become possible for developers to accomplish it using different hacks and third-party libraries. Server-side rendering, in fact, renders the HTML of the page on the server side and sends the rendered content to the browser, and because of this, it becomes easy to have the search engine spiders crawl and index the content, making Flutter Web SEO-friendly.

3. Optimized Bundle Size with Tree Shaking

One of the problems that Flutter Web faced was that the emitted JavaScript bundle size was too large. Since the large files make page loading slow, it became an SEO problem. Tree shaking has been added by Flutter, which is a build process for eliminating unnecessary code that reduces the app bundle size at runtime by a huge amount. Developers may speed up the loading of Flutter Web apps by removing unnecessary code and assets. In addition to offering a better user experience, faster websites also score higher in search results, making Flutter Web SEO-friendly.

4. SEO-Friendly Routing with Flutter Web

Flutter Web's routing has been enhanced to provide developers with greater control over page rendering. Although Flutter Web applications are single-page applications (SPAs) and hence not easy to optimize for SEO, the platform now provides developers with an easier way of having greater control over their URLs, titles, metadata, and other SEO-friendly attributes. Plugins like flutter_web_plugins and flutter_router enable developers to structure routes in a lovely way, thereby having different URLs for every page of the application with ease. Proper URL structures and meta tags can be used to make Flutter Web applications SEO-friendly. Schema markup and Open Graph tags for richer snippets can be included, thereby making Flutter Web SEO-friendly.

5. Highlight Progressive Web App (PWA) Features

Flutter Web can also enable Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), which allow your app to work smoothly on any device and under any network conditions. PWAs provide a better user experience, and Google prefers PWAs for more search result visibility. PWAs are SEO-friendly because of so many reasons:

• Offline Access: PWAs can be cached so that users can access the site even offline or in areas with poor network coverage, thereby reducing bounce rates.
• Instant Loading: Asset and content caching allow PWAs to load in an instant, enhancing Core Web Vitals and page loading.
• Mobile-Optimized Design: PWAs are mobile-usability optimized according to Google's mobile-first indexing requirement.

Conclusion

Although app development with Flutter did not initially give the optimum possible experience from the SEO standpoint, there were Flutter SEO Mistakes to Avoid. However, with recent upgrades to the framework added on top of enhanced search engine ability to crawl, it is now a much more viable option for SEO-optimized web development. So contact us today and stay ahead of the curve with the latest mobile apps.