So far, we've discussed creating Svelte components *on the client*, which is to say the browser. But you can also render Svelte components in Node.js. This can result in better perceived performance as it means the application starts rendering while the page is still downloading, before any JavaScript executes. It also has SEO advantages in some cases, and can be beneficial for people running older browsers that can't or won't run your JavaScript for whatever reason.
### Using the compiler
If you're using the Svelte compiler, whether directly or via an integration like [rollup-plugin-svelte](https://github.com/rollup/rollup-plugin-svelte) or [svelte-loader](https://github.com/sveltejs/svelte-loader), you can tell it to generate a server-side component by passing the `generate: 'ssr'` option:
```js
const { js } = svelte.compile(source, {
generate: 'ssr' // as opposed to 'dom', the default
});
```
### Registering Svelte
Alternatively, an easy way to use the server-side renderer is to *register* it:
```js
require('svelte/register.js');
```
Now you can `require` your components:
```js
const Thing = require('./components/Thing.html');
```
If you prefer to use a different file extension, you can pass options like so:
```js
require('svelte/register.js')({
extensions: ['.svelte']
});
```
### Server-side API
Components have a different API in Node.js – rather than being a constructor that you use with the `new` keyword, a component is an object with a `render(data, options)` method:
> The SSR compiler will generate a CommonJS module for each of your components – meaning that `import` and `export` statements are converted into their `require` and `module.exports` equivalents. If your components have non-component dependencies, they must also work as CommonJS modules in Node. If you're using ES2015 modules, we recommend the [`esm`](https://github.com/standard-things/esm) module for automatically converting them to CommonJS.
You could put the resulting `css` in a separate stylesheet, or include them in the page inside a `<style>` tag. If you do this, you will probably want to prevent the client-side compiler from including the CSS again. For the CLI, use the `--no-css` flag. In build tool integrations like `rollup-plugin-svelte`, pass the `css: false` option.
