We just finished moving our website off Lovable and onto TanStack Start, hosted on Vercel.
To a visitor, the old site and the new one look almost the same.
Under the hood, they work in opposite ways, and that difference decides whether search engines can index you and whether your links look right when someone shares them.
This explains why we made the switch, what changed, and what we’d tell any team that built its first site with an AI app builder.
Where we started: a single-page app built on Lovable
About a year ago, we built our site with Lovable. It was the right call at the time.
Lovable let us go from idea to a live, good-looking site fast, without a big engineering investment.
Under the hood, Lovable produced a Vite + React single-page application, or SPA.
In an SPA, the server sends the browser a nearly empty HTML page plus a bundle of JavaScript.
The browser runs that JavaScript, and only then does the actual content appear.
For a person on a modern browser, this happens in a blink. But people aren’t the only ones reading your website.
Problem 1: search engines saw an empty page
When a search engine crawler first requested one of our pages, it got that empty HTML shell.
To see our real content, the crawler had to run our JavaScript too.
Google can do that, but not right away.
JavaScript rendering is slower and more expensive for search engines, so it gets delayed and is less reliable.
Other crawlers often skip it entirely.
The result: our pages were indexed later and less completely than they should have been, which held back our search visibility.
Problem 2: our shared links looked broken
The second problem was more visible.
When you paste a link into LinkedIn, X, or Slack, you get a preview card with a title, image, and description.
Those platforms build that card from Open Graph tags (og:title, og:image, og:description) in the page’s initial HTML.
Here’s the catch: these platforms don’t run JavaScript when they fetch a link.
Our Open Graph tags were set by JavaScript, so the platforms never saw them. Links to our site often showed up with a missing image, a generic title, or no description at all.
For a team that shares a lot of content on LinkedIn, that’s a real cost. A bare link gets far less attention than one with a strong image and headline.
The fix: render the page before it leaves the server
We rebuilt the site on TanStack Start, a modern React framework that supports server-side rendering (SSR) and static site generation (SSG).
The idea is simple. Instead of sending an empty shell and asking the browser to build the page, the server (or the build process, for static pages) assembles the full HTML first. Every visitor, whether a person, a Google crawler, or LinkedIn’s link fetcher, gets the complete page on the very first request.
Two things improved right away:
Every page is indexable on the first request. Search engines see our real content without having to run any JavaScript.
Link previews work everywhere. Our og:title, og:image, and og:description tags are in the initial HTML, so LinkedIn, X, and Slack show the right image, title, and description.
Visitors still get the fast, interactive React experience. Once the page loads, React takes over in the browser just as before.
Why we moved hosting to Vercel
New framework, new home. We moved hosting from Lovable to Vercel, which gives us a proper Git-based deployment pipeline. In practice, that means:
Preview deployments for every pull request. Each proposed change gets its own live URL, so we can review it before it goes public.
A global edge CDN. Pages are served from locations close to each visitor, wherever they are.
One-click rollbacks. If something breaks, we can return to the last good version in seconds.
Separate environment settings for production, preview, and development, so testing never touches the live site.
Complete build logs. When something goes wrong, we can see exactly what happened.
None of this is exotic. It’s how most professional web teams work. Now we work that way too.
We own our code now
The quieter benefit may matter most in the long run.
Our website is no longer tied to Lovable’s platform for building, hosting, or deployment.
The codebase lives in our own Git repository and uses standard, widely supported tools. Any developer who knows React can pick it up.
If we ever want to change hosts again, we can. That removes vendor lock-in and puts the team in full control of how the site grows.
What we’d tell other teams
AI app builders like Lovable are a great way to get started.
They got us online quickly, and we’d make the same choice again for a first version.
But a site that has to be found, shared, and maintained for years has different needs than a prototype.
If your site was built as a single-page app, try a quick test: paste one of your links into LinkedIn or Slack and see what the preview shows.
If the image or title is missing, search engines are probably struggling too.
For us, the move to TanStack Start and Vercel means better search visibility, link previews that look right everywhere we share, and a codebase we fully control.
That’s a solid foundation for whatever we build next.