On – Prerender.io Case Study
In 2023, On, a premium sportswear brand with an estimated $16.18 billion valuation, ran into significant issues when preparing for a front-end update.
After using Prerender.io for nearly three years, the team’s core problems have long been resolved with significant improvements along the way: a 67% increase in Google traffic, a 98% increase in Bing traffic, and millions of dollars saved per year.
On is a global premium sportswear brand with a multi-billion-dollar ecommerce business spanning more than 60 countries. The company is known for its technical innovation, distinctive design, and a digitally led go-to-market strategy to support rapid international growth.
Digital visibility is key to On’s growth. Search engines, paid media platforms, social networks, and emerging AI discovery channels play a critical role in how customers find and experience the brand worldwide, across a complex, multi-market digital ecosystem. As such, consistent and reliable discoverability with a solution like Prerender.io isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a necessity.
On has been using Prerender.io as a core part of its ecommerce infrastructure, supporting major frontend updates, global expansion, and sustained growth across organic and paid channels. What began as a solution to stabilize rendering during a high-risk migration has become a long-term foundation for discoverability and performance at scale—nearly three years later.
Back in 2023, ahead of a major front-end update, On began seeing issues that extended well beyond SEO, introducing operational risk across multiple revenue-generating teams.
JavaScript-heavy pages weren’t rendering reliably for crawlers, creating cascading impacts across a cross-functional digital organization that included product, performance marketing, content, and brand teams. Examples include:
What started as a routine upgrade quickly posed a material risk for a billion-dollar ecommerce business that depends on high-availability digital channels. “We weren’t just trying to protect our traffic levels. We needed to protect the entire digital marketing ecosystem,” says Marilena Pixner, Senior Organic Growth and SEO Specialist at On.
Ultimately, the root cause was consistent across every issue: search bots couldn’t “read” On’s JavaScript content, which led to the cascading results.
To resolve this, On evaluated server-side rendering as a potential long-term solution. But implementing SSR at enterprise scale would have required months of development, ongoing maintenance, additional infrastructure, and a significant reallocation of engineering bandwidth.
“A full SSR solution would have tied up our development resources for several months,” says Pixner. At a time when business continuity and roadmap execution were critical, the opportunity cost and operational risk were too high.
“We weren’t just trying to protect our organic traffic levels with the updates. We needed to protect our entire digital marketing system.”
With major releases ahead and a global ecommerce footprint to support, pulling engineering off the roadmap wasn’t an option. Other tools were reviewed, but they lacked clarity, didn’t scale well, or introduced new operational overhead at a moment when the team needed simplicity.
They needed a solution that protected traffic during the migration, kept ads and social previews functioning, and didn’t require rebuilding their architecture or millions of dollars in development costs.
That’s what led them to Prerender.io.
What made Prerender.io stand out was a combination of reliability, ease of implementation, and clear strategic value.
Prerender.io’s solution ensured bots could always access On’s content, regardless of how dynamic the new front-end site became. This protected its SEO, paid campaigns, and social previews at a time when stability mattered most and significant revenue was on the line.
As a one-time integration, Prerender.io fit cleanly into On’s architecture without introducing new complexity. The rollout required minimal engineering involvement and didn’t interfere with ongoing frontend development.
From the first conversations, the setup path was straightforward, and support along the way was thorough, detailed, and proactive. “The support from the team was a big differentiator,” says Pixner.
Compared to the cost of building and maintaining SSR and the revenue risk from continued ad disapprovals, Prerender.io delivered immediate value. “It offered the strongest combination of stability, speed, and value,” says Pixner.
Once implemented, On gained a stable rendering foundation that protected their visibility across search, paid channels, and social platforms, all while allowing the frontend migration to move forward without issues.
“Prerender.io offers the strongest combination of stability, speed, and value.” – Marilena Pixner, Senior Organic Growth and SEO Specialist at On
Within days of their Prerender.io integration, On saw visibility stabilize across key search and marketing channels. Within weeks, the improvements were measurable across every platform.
And over the last three years, they have continued to see significant results:
One of the most pressing issues for On was disapproved ads on Google Shopping and DV360.
Because Googlebot couldn’t render critical page elements, high-performing campaigns were getting rejected, throttled, or paused—creating real revenue risk for a high-performing ecommerce brand. Once On integrated with Prerender.io, the fix was immediate: all Google Ads started running smoothly. Campaign delivery normalized instantly, impression share returned, and spend scaled predictably again. “Prerender.io directly solved our Google Ad issues,” Pixner shares.
This one improvement alone protected significant annual revenue that would have been lost or delayed during campaign downtime, estimating millions of dollars in protected annual revenue.
Across search engines, Prerender.io stabilized rendering and eliminated the inconsistencies caused by the migration. Indexation improved, and search traffic responded quickly:
✅ +67% increase in Google traffic
✅ +98% increase in Bing traffic
✅ Faster recognition of new and updated content
Implementing Prerender.io also skyrocketed On’s image traffic performance, ensuring that bots could access every one of their images in search.
On’s screenshot below showcases the results after their Prerender.io integration in 2023.
On’s image traffic results after implementing Prerender.io.
After integrating with Prerender.io, On saw immediate benefits across multiple channels:
What began as a rendering fix became a cross-channel stabilizer for their entire digital ecosystem, supporting the rest of the team’s marketing efforts.
By choosing Prerender.io instead of building SSR in-house, On avoided a costly architectural overhaul that would have pulled developers away from critical roadmap work.
The team estimates that an SSR implementation would have required:
By avoiding this with a one-time integration, the On team avoided high costs from development implementation, ongoing engineering resources, and preventable technical debt.
“Prerender.io gave us the stability of SSR without the cost or the timing impact,” says Pixner.
To validate Prerender.io’s direct impact, the On team decided to run a test: they temporarily disabled Prerender.io for one month in a specific, low-traffic market.
Without Prerender.io, traffic dropped to less than 10% of its normal levels.
On’s controlled test of turning Prerender.io off in a controlled test.
After turning it back on, traffic stabilized to what it was before. This test alone is a clear signal that Prerender.io is a critical driver of On’s online discoverability.
For the On team, “the impact of Prerender.io was significant,” but the experience of working with the team is just as important.
From first conversations through to implementation and optimization, the On team highlights how clarity, responsiveness, and a partnership-driven approach are key factors that stand out.
“The support from the Prerender.io team is a big differentiator,” Pixner shares. Every step of the rollout was guided, documented, and validated with a level of responsiveness that made the integration feel seamless, even during their high-stakes front-end migration.
“The reliability of the product matters, but the support matters just as much. Prerender.io has been strong on both.”
With Prerender.io in place, On has built a durable rendering foundation that scales with their business, not just their current architecture.
As On continues to expand globally, launch new collections, and evolve its frontend experience, Prerender.io ensures that every crawler, bot, and platform can reliably access and understand their content. This removes rendering as a point of friction across SEO, AI search, paid media, social, and emerging discovery channels, allowing teams to move faster without risking visibility or revenue.
Just as importantly, the solution requires minimal ongoing engineering effort. On’s development teams remain focused on product innovation and roadmap priorities, while marketing teams operate with confidence that campaigns, previews, and product pages will perform consistently across channels.
What began as a solution to protect traffic during a high-risk migration has become a long-term strategic asset, supporting organic growth, safeguarding paid media investments, and stabilizing On’s entire digital marketing ecosystem.
As On continues to scale as a global ecommerce leader, Prerender.io remains a trusted partner helping ensure that innovation never comes at the cost of discoverability.
Speak with our enterprise team to skyrocket your online discoverability—just like On.
