The Disadvantages of Single Page Applications (2014)
As with everything, if you're going to do SPA, you should do it well. So far, one of the best SPA website I've seen is <a href="https://gocardless.com" rel="nofollow">https://gocardless.com</a> (disclaimer: I work there).<p>Once loaded it's probably one of the fastest website I've browsed, and it doesn't have any of the drawbacks you mentioned:<p>navigating to a new page is quick: ✓<p>navigating back is quick: ✓<p>remembering scroll position: ✓<p>cancelling navigation: ✗ but we won't allow duplicate requests so not an issue<p>SEO: ✓<p>Navigation and data loss: ? (no idea how we handle that  tbh)<p>Navigation and loading CSS & JS: ✓ we load everything on the first load (~ 880kB) and that's it. I don't think it will ever be worst than MPA<p>Analytics: ✓<p>Automated functional testing: ✓ our unit + e2e test suites run in about 4 minutes (CI)<p>Our splash pages are open-sourced if you want to have a look at our setup: <a href="https://github.com/gocardless/splash-pages" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/gocardless/splash-pages</a>