what does dynamic rendering actually mean?

Question

Let me explain the situation.

Google states that we can use dynamic rendering which just means to use Puppeteer, Rendertron or prerender.io. So, for google bots, we return fully rendered html and for clients, we return client-side html's.

What I don't understand is that how is dynamic rendering different from SSR ? The whole idea of using dynamic rendering is to simplify the processes of not using SSR in the first place, but using dynamic rendering still makes me think that we have to build a server, create html + async calls in there and return the final html which SSR does exactly.

How is it different from SSR ?

Answer 1

It means that you can serve SSR page only to crawlers and regular (CSR) version to client. This way your server doesn't have to do all that hard work for all requests but only for specific UA's. Google crawlers.