🔗 Multi vs Single Page Apps: user experience, performance, complexity and more

Recently, I have built some Projects App twice as:

• Multi Page Application (MPA) - boosted with HTMX to support partial updates
• Single Page Application (SPA) - implemented with the help of React

The goal here was to revisit Multi vs Single Page Applications debate and compare:

• User experience - does one feel noticeably better than the other? Does one allow for something that the other cannot?
• Performance - are there significant differences when it comes to page load speeds?
• Complexity - which one is simpler to implement, maintain and develop?
• Tradeoffs - what both approaches give, what do they take (nothing is for free)?

To establish what these differences are, we will go through two implementations of Projects App - one as HTMX MPA and the other as React SPA. This makes our comparison more concrete and objective, since the same functionalities were implemented twice, only approach - MPA vs SPA - is what makes these cases different. Let's then see what set of tradeoffs both of these strategies bring to the table; but before that, we must establish a few definitions to make sure that we have a common understanding of the most important terminology used here.