Single-page vs multi-page apps. What to choose?
To make a well-thought choice you should put the content in charge. The end purpose of every app or website is to deliver an excellent content to an appropriate target audience. And SPA or MPA is just a form you use to present it.
You should pay attention to the single-page application design pattern if you want a dynamic platform with a lot of content. For instance, if you are about to promote one product or service or it's targeted to a narrow group of users. SPA is suitable for you if you don't need heavy data processing tasks and many pages with a different design. Also, go for the SPA if you want to make a mobile application from it.
Stages of web applications development
Some of the use cases when reating a single page application is more suitable:
- Telling a story about your product by guiding a user from the top to the bottom of the screen;
- Building a small app that costs less to create a big app from it in the perspective;
- Creating an SPA as a temporary app while a highly time-consuming app is being developed;
- You use such promotion channels as targeted ads and direct links from social networks and don't rely heavily on SEO.
SPA is perfect for SaaS solutions, private communities, social networks.
You should go for multi-page applications if you have a large company that offers a wide variety of products. Another reason to choose MPA is you need a lot of user interaction and technical features in your app. MPA is a better choice for large e-commerce stores and marketplaces like eBay, huge web portals. Also, this kind of apps often has a huge user base which SPA is also more suitable for.
There's another option considering single-page app vs multi-page app that we haven't mentioned. It's using a hybrid approach that allows creating an SPA with synthetic pages that uses URL anchors. It's also an attractive solution as it enables to combine a complex functionality of an MPA with a convenient navigation of an SPA. A hybrid approach strives to utilize the best of SPA and MPA and decrease their drawbacks.
As you see, it's not a simple task to choose between single-page vs multi-page design pattern (and vs hybrid approach). In fact, it reveals a need for a good consultant or advisor who is a professional in software development. We fully understand it and offer help in making such an uneasy choice.