How to choose between SSG and SSR?

Question

I am currently exploring Nextjs and building a website with the same framework. The website has a public flow, protected routes (such as user dashboard, user project details, and general user data) , and product pages.

The question is, how do i choose between SSG and SSR a particular route. This has been my strategy so far

1. All static pages (forms, user input) - SSG
2. BLOG links to be all SSG

My questions are:

1. The dashboard and the user details pages will not real time data, but data that might have project specific info. Is this a use case SSG with incremental revalidation, or SSR?

2. The publicly available product details pages. There might be upwards of a thousand products. In such cases, does the long build process of pre rendering the product pages outweigh the potential seo benefits? Because this seems like an ideal case for SSG with revalidation. Or is it best suited for SSR?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

It's clear you know the difference between the two/three options.

1. SSG - hydrate using client-side queries.
2. SSG - might have thousands of products

Premature scaling is never a good idea and you rarely end up with a good solution for both scenarios. SSG is likely better now but you could use ISR - however, go with the solution that solves today's problem.

A static site with 1,000 pages can lint & build in ~2 minutes. It's often more cost effective (time, effort, and hosting cost) to use SSG and use a different solution when you know your bottlenecks.