Why React and Vue need hash routing but Svelte does not

If you’ve ever deployed a small SPA to GitHub Pages, you’ve probably seen it:
the app runs fine locally, but refreshing /about gives a 404.

The reason is simple — static hosts only serve files, not routes.

Why React and Vue break

React Router and Vue Router use the History API (pushState) for clean URLs like /about.
That looks nice, but on GitHub Pages the server doesn’t know what /about is.
It only sees that there’s no /about/index.html and returns a 404.

The quick fixes are:

• Switch to HashRouter (React) or createWebHashHistory (Vue).
• Or set up a redirect so every path falls back to index.html (not possible on GitHub Pages).

That’s why on strict static hosts, hash routing is usually the only option.

Why Svelte feels different

Svelte doesn’t ship with a router by default. Many small Svelte apps just use plain anchor links, so each route is already an actual HTML file — which works perfectly on static hosting.

With SvelteKit + static adapter, it goes further: every route is pre-rendered as a file (/about/index.html).
This makes routes behave naturally, no hash fragments required.

Takeaways

• Static hosting only knows about files, not client-side routes.
• Hash routing is a workaround to survive on hosts without rewrites.
• Frameworks that pre-render routes (SvelteKit, Astro) avoid the problem entirely.

So if you’re deploying to GitHub Pages, expect React and Vue to need some extra setup — while Svelte can feel more “static friendly” out of the box.