About
Softonic is the world’s largest software and app discovery platform, founded in 1997 and headquartered in Barcelona, Spain. With more than 100 million users and 70 million downloads per month, Softonic helps internet users across the globe find, compare, and safely download software, apps, games, extensions, and tools for virtually every use case.
What sets Softonic apart is its commitment to security and user experience in a category notorious for malware and unwanted software. Every app on the platform is reviewed and verified, giving users a trusted destination in a space where trust is rare.
At Softonic’s scale, organic search is everything. With millions of constantly updated app pages, each competing for visibility across thousands of keywords, technical SEO performance is the engine that drives the entire business. That’s what brought them to Prerender.io.
The Challenge
Serving millions of users a month, Softonic’s sheer size presents a significant SEO challenge.
When those tens of millions of users could be navigating off Softonic’s site and onto the original host of the app at any time, the stakes are high. Their in-house SEO manager, Nacho Mascort, makes sure they follow all industry best practices and each page is optimized for the right keyword. Unfortunately, when hosting thousands of third-party applications, it’s impossible to ensure that each app lives up to the SEO standard Softonic sets.
The result: inconsistent rendering performance across millions of pages, with Google unable to reliably crawl and index everything Softonic needed it to see. With tens of millions of users potentially navigating away from the platform to the original app host at any moment, every lost ranking is lost revenue. Softonic needed to get quick SEO wins without compromising user experience.
At Softonic, we care a lot about SEO and how we look in the eyes of Google and even other search engines… The truth is that this is not always the case for the third-party properties we onboard to our ecosystem. We saw a huge bump in performance when we started prerendering.
Marc Monguió
VP of Product and Engineering, Softonic
The Solution
Softonic needed a rendering fix that was fast, consistent, and didn’t require months of engineering work. This is exactly where Prerender.io came in.
Softonic had experience with server-side rendering, but SSR alone wasn’t solving the problem at the scale they needed. Integrating a new tech property into their ecosystem and getting it performing to Softonic’s SEO standards through SSR meant months of development time, at a time when the business couldn’t afford to spend on every onboarding. That’s what led them to choose Prerender.io.
They needed a solution that was fast, immediate, and produced reliable, consistent results: “Prerender.io is a nice middle solution for quick results.”
When Softonic implemented Prerender.io, they made sure that every page on their website was fully optimized and ready for Google to index, whether hosted within the company’s server or on one of their many third-party apps.
“As part of Softonic’s product ecosystem, we operate third-party website properties with tens of millions of monthly users,” Monguió said. “In order to integrate them into our ecosystem and mitigate complex operations in the mid-and long-term, we pursue technical migrations to use a single tech stack across all the domains. Prerender.io fits well as part of this migration process since it would allow us for quick wins on rendering times that benefit SEO, and ultimately UX.”
Prerender.io fits well as part of this migration process since it would allow us for quick wins on rendering times that benefit SEO, and ultimately UX.
Marc Monguió
VP of Product and Engineering, Softonic
The Results
After Prerender.io improved the crawl and indexing success rates of Softonic’s dynamic pages, the results influenced Softonic’s SEO health to skyrocket. Consequently, they generated more organic traffic to their website.
Prerender also helps Softonic run at peak performance, which gives it stellar results across the most widely used website diagnostic tests.
- Google PageSpeed Insights gives Softonic’s desktop version a score of 92.
- Webpage Test gives Softonic an A grade across the board and an enviable TTFB latency of 446ms.
- It also earns an A grade from GTMetrix.
The results that Prerender.io brought to Softonic translate into real traffic and revenue. That faster speed and more secure web experience help Softonic bring in more than 40 million visitors per month on average.
“Getting to improve rendering times in a matter of days instead of months makes a difference to allow Google to pick up on our changes earlier, and therefore, improve the cumulative traffic,” said Monguió.
Looking Ahead
Softonic’s rendering challenges aren’t going away. As the platform continues to onboard new third-party properties and expand its app catalogue, the need to quickly bring new pages up to Softonic’s SEO standard becomes more pressing.
Prerender.io remains a core part of how they manage that at scale: a consistent rendering layer that ensures every page, regardless of origin, is visible to search engines from day one.
Ready to join a growing list of enterprise brands that rely on Prerender.io? Book a call with our team to find a custom enterprise solution for you.
