GitHub Actions to Compile Blazor WebAssembly for SEO at Static Website Hosing

[nakigoe]

Hi Jeffery, thank you for your lessons and your answers!

How to get my Blazor WebAssembly website indexed for SEO?

I had Blazor WebAssembly Hosted Prerendered running locally (it's great, it can even run on Internet Explorer 11!!!) This was a default Blazor WebAssembly Hosted with modified settings according to Microsoft Docs for prerendering: https://docs.microsoft.com/aspnet/core/blazor/components/prerendering-and-integration

• delete index.html from the Client wwwroot folder
• add _host.cshtml and _layout.cshtml to the Server/Pages
• set app.MapFallbackToPage("/_Host"); in program.cs

FetchData.razor throws an error: «There is no registered service of type 'System.Net.Http.HttpClient'»,

What can be wrong?

I really hate server-side hosting, they either offer services that I never use if I pay ahead, or charge with hidden fees once they get one's bank card when charging 'per usage'.

For example, the problem with AWS is, that having 0-5 visitors a day, with Blazor WebAssembly I received the following message: Your AWS account has exceeded 85% of the usage limit for one or more AWS Free Tier-eligible services for the month of March. (5Gb)

$0.023 per GB build artifacts stored 42.458 GigaBytes $0.98 Vat included $1.20 in March What????? Where do these 45 GigaBytes come from?

So I'm staying with static Blazor WebAssembly for now, they have 100Gb/month free bandwidth on Vercel.com

[csharpfritz]

WebAssembly pages are not currently indexed by the search engines like Google and Bing. The way around it is to prerender with a server using ASP.NET Core.

45GB of activity is a LOT of content in build artifacts. How are you building your application? I don't see anywhere near this volume with GitHub actions and Azure Static Websites

[nakigoe]

That was the stupid code from a very popular Internet post on AWS Blazor WebAssembly hosting:

version: 1
frontend:
  phases:
    preBuild:
      commands:
        - curl -sSL https://dot.net/v1/dotnet-install.sh > dotnet-install.sh
        - chmod +x *.sh
        - ./dotnet-install.sh -c 6.0.3 -InstallDir ./dotnet6
        - ./dotnet6/dotnet --version
    build:
      commands:
        - ./dotnet6/dotnet publish -c Release -o release
  artifacts:
    baseDirectory: /release/wwwroot
    files:
      - '**/*'
  cache:
    paths: []

AWS Amplify provides a Docker container, everything was fine until the bill came. Probably the correct solution would be:

1. to compile the website with GitHub actions to the repo branch, like «gh-pages» (I have this one covered for Blazor WebAssembly)
2. connect the branch with compiled code to a hosting provider. (works perfectly for Blazor WebAssembly)

[csharpfritz]

No.. a static webassembly site will not compile into content that can be search-indexed in the current state of search engine crawlers.

You will need to render the web assembly content with something like server-side rendering like ASP.NET Core hosting.

Andrew Lock wrote an article describing an approach to render pages without ASP.NET Core: https://andrewlock.net/prerending-a-blazor-webassembly-app-without-an-asp-net-core-host-app/