SPA Vs MPA

There are many pros and cons of SPA as well as of MPA. I hope that the lines below will clear the differences between these two design patterns and bring you closer to the point where you will know what kind of application fits your idea more. And make your idea about own application come true.

Single-Page Application

A single-page application is an app that works inside a browser and does not require page reloading during use. You are using this type of applications every day. These are, for instance: Gmail, Google Maps, Facebook or GitHub.
SPAs are all about serving an outstanding UX by trying to imitate a “natural” environment in the browser — no page reloads, no extra wait time. It is just one web page that you visit which then loads all other content using JavaScript — which they heavily depend on.

SPA requests the markup and data independently and renders pages straight in the browser. We can do this thanks to the advanced JavaScript frameworks like AngularJS, Ember.js, Meteor.js, Knockout.js .
Single-page sites help keep the user in one, comfortable web space where content is presented to the user in a simple, easy and workable fashion.

Multi-Page Application

Multiple-page applications work in a “traditional” way. Every change eg. display the data or submit data back to server requests rendering a new page from the server in the browser. These applications are large, bigger than SPAs because they need to be. Due to the amount of content, these applications have many levels of UI. Luckily, it’s not a problem anymore. Thanks to AJAX, we don’t have to worry that big and complex applications have to transfer a lot of data between server and browser. That solution improves and it allows to refresh only particular parts of the application. On the other hand, it adds more complexity and it is more difficult to develop than a single-page application.

SPA or MPA?

Before deploying a web application, you need to consider the goal of it. If you know you need multiple categories (because, for instance, you run an online shop or publish a lot of other content) — use a multi-page site. If you are sure that your site is appropriate for a pure single-page experience — go for it. And if you like SPA but can just barely fit everything into a single page, consider the hybrid site instead. This is another way I haven’t mentioned before. A hybrid application takes what is the best in both approaches and try to minimize the disadvantages. It is, in fact, a single page application which uses URL anchors as synthetic pages enabling more in build browser navigation and preference functionality.

Which one to choose?

• Speed

Speed is an important factor here — people’s attention spans are getting shorter, and we get more and more impatient. SPA’s load faster. Why? As it loads the majority of app resources just once. The page doesn’t reload entirely, whenever a new piece of data is requested by the user.

MPA is slower as the browser must reload the entire page from scratch whenever the user wants to access new data or moves to a different part of the website. The optimal loading time for a website is 0.4 seconds. If your website or app is image-heavy then choosing a SPA is a safer option.

• Coupling

SPA is strongly decoupled meaning that front-end and back-end are separate. Single-page applications use APIs developed by server-side developers to read and display data. In MPA’s, front-end and back-end are more interdependent. All coding is usually housed under one project.

• Search Engine Optimization

One of the weaknesses of the SPA is SEO. Unfortunately, they aren’t as SEO friendly as MPA’s. It’s primarily because the majority of single-page applications are run on JavaScript, which most search engines do not support. Web pages are indexed through “crawling” or “spidering”. Search engine crawlers download the page’s HTML files which makes static HTML web-pages are easier to rank.

MPA enables better website positioning as each page can be optimized for a different keyword. Also, meta tags can be included on every page — this positively impacts Google rankings.