What is React?

React is a JavaScript library that builds interfaces that help users interact with a website. Whenever you browse a modern website and see on-screen menus, search bars, and buttons, those are usually made with React.

What is React?

The SEO Drawbacks of Using React Without Prerender®

Easy to learn, but you sacrifice SEO
Easy to learn, but you sacrifice SEO
React is great for building Single Page Applications (SPAs) that run fast and perform well. Unfortunately, using React is very problematic from an SEO standpoint.
Search engines can't index efficiently
Search engines can't index efficiently
React websites are usually generated on the client-side browser. This makes it difficult for search engines to index your content, which means users won’t find your pages. SPAs rely on JavaScript to load a web page’s content dynamically.
There are multiple search engines to consider
There are multiple search engines to consider
Google claims that they’re getting better at crawling JavaScript pages, but this hasn’t been proven yet. Other popular search engines such as Bing, Yandex, and DuckDuckGo cannot do it at all.

How To Optimize React Pages To Make Them SEO-Friendly

Make a Choice
You have two options if you want to make your React pages discoverable on search engines: server-side rendering (SSR) or prerendering.
Server-side Rendering
React can render pages on the server-side, making it easier for search engine crawlers to discover and index your content. However, it requires a more advanced setup using the Next.JS library, along with an additional time-consuming and expensive server.
Prerendering
Meanwhile, using Prerender® is painless and straightforward. Our software will seamlessly create fully-rendered, static HTML versions of your website for social media, search engine crawlers and more.
How To Optimize React Pages To Make Them SEO-Friendly

Frequently-Asked Questions

  • Rendering your web page on the server, or using dynamic rendering to deliver your page appropriately to a bot or a human
  • Making asynchronous HTTP requests only after you’ve rendered the content
  • Redirecting the user to a 404 page if no content is found
  • Testing each page with the Fetch as Google tool in Google Search Console

What Are the SEO Benefits of Dynamic Rendering for React?

Dynamic rendering comes with a lot of benefits that help site rankings and provide a better user experience.

  • Helps Google Crawl SPAs: make your web pages easily crawlable while having the heightened performance and improved UX that comes with using JavaScript SPAs
  • Faster Indexation: get your webpages ranking on Google within days, not weeks
  • Faster Response Times: drop your TTFB latency drop down to almost nothing, easily pass Google Pagespeed Insights and other speed tests, and get your pages efficiently cached
  • Faster (and More) Search Rankings: get more of your web pages indexed in a shorter amount of time, and take up as much real estate on Google search results as possible
  • Increased Organic Traffic: The sooner your React web pages are ranking on Google, the sooner you can get start getting organic traffic and the ROI that comes with it

Can Dynamic Rendering Cause a Google Penalty?

At a surface level, it can be easy to confuse dynamic rendering with cloaking, a common black hat SEO practice notoriously used by spammy marketers and unethical website owners. Aren’t you showing Google one thing and your human users another? Technically, no. Dynamic rendering and cloaking are different. Cloaking is the practice of willfully showing a different set of content to the user-agent, whether it’s a human or a search engine crawler. That’s different from dynamic rendering, which serves that same content to humans and bots using different methods for each, which is not against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes server errors, which Google considers an error instead of cloaking. Therefore, dynamic rendering is not cloaking, nor does it cause Google penalties.

Is Prerender® Google Approved?

Prerender® isn’t just Google-approved, it’s one of Google’s only officially-recommended solutions for dynamic rendering. Google recommending a third-party software in its official documentation for indexation or anything else is extremely rare. That’s why we’re proud to be a Google-approved solution for dynamic rendering.