SPA Vs. MPA: The Comprehensive Comparison
This blog covers everything you need to know about [SPA Vs. MPA](https://www.moontechnolabs.com/blog/spa-vs-mpa/). It highlights each application’s distinctive advantages, examines their main distinctions, and discusses crucial elements when choosing the best one for your project.

What is an SPA (Single Page Application)?
When accessed in a web browser, single-page applications (SPAs) load all the user’s browser content onto a single page. This implies that, unlike typical websites or MPAs, where you navigate between pages, you interact with everything within the app on a single screen.

When you launch a SPA, the program leverages JavaScript’s dynamic rewriting to progressively change what appears on the screen in response to your specific actions. SPAs include social networking sites such as Facebook and X (previously Twitter).

Both apps refresh and show you more content as you scroll down your feed without requiring you to reload the full page or navigate to a new one. The same reasoning holds when navigating through the app’s other pages.

An SPA will reload the app’s core content, keeping the header, menu, and footer the same as every other page instead of reloading the entire program.

What is an MPA (Multi-page Application)?
Every time you finish a job assigned to you, MPA loads an additional page. These apps are regarded as traditional web applications because they have been around longer and perform similarly to regular websites.

In an MPA, when you execute a particular action (such as clicking a button or hyperlink), the application takes you to a new page and loads it entirely.

SPAs, on the other hand, refresh the portions of the application you interact with, leaving the remaining page elements intact. Because of this, MPAs are made up of several distinct static HTML pages or web pages rather than a single page that changes dynamically each time you carry out a particular action.

Companies that offer a variety of products and services usually use an MPA architecture, which allows them to customize each static page’s appearance and feel to reflect their brand better.

SPA Vs. MPA: Key Differences
There are two distinct approaches to creating websites: MPA and SPA, each with a unique design and function. Selecting the appropriate architecture for web development is essential for both user experience and performance. Knowing their primary differences can help you select the best option for your project.

Primary SPA vs. MPA Differences
SPAs are faster and more fluid because everything loads onto a single page, and content is updated without refreshing. MPAs are multi-page documents that load a new page whenever you click a link. While MPAs work better for larger websites with much content, SPAs are excellent for short, interactive apps.

Performance and speed
Speed is crucial in this situation since people’s attention spans are getting shorter, and our impatience is growing. SPAs load more quickly because they load most of the app’s resources simply once. The webpage doesn’t fully reload each time a user requests a new piece of data.

When a user navigates to a different website section or wants to access fresh data, the browser reloads the entire page, making MPA slower.

User experience and navigation
Since mobile devices account for most traffic, SPA is more mobile-friendly. Even the tech giant Google has begun to favor mobile devices over desktop ones and is spending money on SPA frameworks to develop mobile applications.

Conversely, the MPA makes better information architecture possible. The quantity of content that can fit on a single HTML page or the total number of pages that can be created is unlimited. Easy navigation enhances user experience by making it easier for users to navigate the website.

SEO capabilities
SEO is one of the SPA’s shortcomings. They lack the SEO friendliness that MPA has. The main reason is that most single-page applications use JavaScript, which is incompatible with most search engines.

Because MPA allows each page to be optimized for a separate keyword, facilitating improved website positioning. Every page can also have meta tags added, which enhances search results.

Development complexity and maintenance
Developing a single-page application (SPA) can be more complex due to the need to manage client-side rendering of dynamic content and navigation between different pages. SPAs provide greater code reliability, which helps increase development efficiency. JavaScript frameworks are commonly utilized while creating SPAs.

Multi-page applications can be less complex to develop because they follow the traditional approach of creating multiple pages. However, they require more resources to manage navigation between pages and ensure the application’s scalability.

Traditional development skills like HTML, CSS, and server-side languages (such as PHP and Ruby) are often used in MPA development.

Security considerations
It should come as no surprise that a website’s size directly correlates with its level of security risk. If you use an MPA, each webpage will need to be secured.

Keeping your page secure in a SPA only requires securing data endpoints more quickly, though not necessarily safer. Because JavaScript does not perform code compilation, making it more susceptible to viruses, SPAs are more vulnerable to hacker attacks.