I still do a lot of hand-coded and static HTML. I'm old-school and have a lot of muscle memory, so 9/10 it's just faster for me to throw together a page of HTML

I still do a lot of hand-coded and static HTML. I'm old-school and have a lot of muscle memory, so 9/10 it's just faster for me to throw together a page of HTML for a custom project and throw it in a directory than to muck about with a CMS or anything server-side. > My main concern is that while search engines can certainly parse JavaScript, I suspect that they still perform best with HTML. This isn't really true anymore, and the evidence for this is that Google themselves uses user-facing JS for lots of applications. Regardless, you can still assess the SEO friendliness of any page with the available tools. That said, there is a good case that you should reduce the complexity of your page whenever possible. If you can get away without a bunch of JS calls, you are introducing fewer things that can introduce mistakes or performance problems.