Vue

What it is

A way of describing a piece of interface as a component: some markup, the data it displays, and what happens when that data changes. Change the data and Vue updates the part of the page that shows it. You never write the “find the element and set its text” code, which is where most hand-rolled interactivity goes wrong.

A component can be the whole screen of an application or one filter panel on an otherwise static page. That range is Vue’s most useful property and the reason I keep reaching for it.

Why it matters if you are paying for a website

Mostly it should not. If a page needs a menu that opens and a form that validates, a framework is overhead you pay for in downloaded code and in a build step.

It starts earning the moment state gets complicated: a catalogue with filters that have to agree with the URL, a configurator where six fields change one price, a table that sorts and paginates without a reload. Written by hand, those become a pile of listeners that disagree with each other by the third change request.

Where I actually use it

Two places, and they look different.

As an island inside a static page. The page is prerendered HTML and one component — the filter, the calculator — is Vue. The visitor downloads the framework only on the pages that have one.

As the front end of a Laravel application. The parts catalogue I built runs Vue 3 against a Laravel backend, which is the shape most of my application work takes: PHP owns the data, the permissions and the background jobs, Vue owns the screen.

What I avoid is the third shape — a marketing site rebuilt as a single-page application, where every visitor downloads a framework to read prose and the search engines get an empty <div> until the JavaScript runs.

What Vue is not

It is not a competitor to WordPress or to a CMS; it does not store or edit content. It is also not automatically bad for SEO — rendered on the server or at build time, a Vue page is ordinary HTML. It is bad for SEO when it is shipped as an empty page that fills itself in the browser, which is a choice about rendering, not about the framework.