If you need to show data to the client then you need to transmit it, either in JSON or HTML. If you don't need to show it then why are you transmitting it? But

If you need to show data to the client then you need to transmit it, either in JSON or HTML. If you don't need to show it then why are you transmitting it? But realistically the amount of data is likely small for most applications and it's probably not the bottleneck.