Popken – Prerender Case Study
Since 1880, Popken Fashion Group has grown from a single German tailor shop into Europe’s largest plus-sized retailer, now operating 32 online stores and hundreds of retail locations across 16 countries. But traditional success metrics weren’t enough. With 2,000 employees and millions of products to promote, they needed to ensure their entire catalog was discoverable in search everywhere—including the emerging world of AI search. Read on to see why Popken uses Prerender.io as their online discoverability tool of choice, for now and the foreseeable future.
Christoph Hein, Head of SEO at Popken Fashion Group (Popken), manages SEO across all 32 of the company’s domains, including Ulla Popken, JP1880, Studio Untold, Laurasøn, and more. He was seeking a way to address a growing list of SEO challenges across his JavaScript websites—while working with limited engineering resources and preparing for a high-risk web project on the roadmap.
At the time, building an in-house server-side rendering (SSR) solution was out of the question. Popken is planning a major frontend update in the years ahead, which will fully occupy developer resources and leave little room for SEO-focused engineering work.
After conducting research, Christoph decided to evaluate two options:
The goal was to determine which solution could deliver stronger results at a more sustainable price point.
Spoiler alert: Prerender.io won.
The Popken SEO team began using Prerender.io in August 2025. In just two weeks, they saw immediate results.
In particular, comparing against the leading competitor, Hein preferred Prerender.io’s:
After calculating the price differences and reviewing performance improvements, the decision became clear.
Ultimately, Prerender.io offered Hein’s team the best combination of speed, stability, and cost efficiency—saving them 50% annually.
Beyond savings, Prerender.io also delivers the technical performance and stability needed for an international company planning a significant project.
The Popken Fashion Group team saw these technical wins early on after integration, and they continue to compound over time.
For Popken, the clearest proof of Prerender.io’s value came from an unplanned real-world test.
After Prerender.io had been live since November, the team was forced to temporarily turn Prerender.io off in December due to an internal technical issue. Almost immediately, rankings dropped across markets and domains.
When Prerender.io was re-enabled in January, rankings were well on their way to full recovery within a week. This pattern was visible across multiple countries and domains, making it clear that the rendering solution was directly tied to organic visibility.
“When we reactivated Prerender.io, our domain visibility quickly started to increase within the week.”
Another clear outcome was better indexation. Because bots now receive fully rendered pages with complete product and category data, previously under-indexed pages became crawlable, indexable, and visible in SERPs.
In one example market shown below, Popken Fashion Group observed approximately 15,000 additional pages indexed after Prerender.io was reactivated.
For a retailer operating over 30 domains, indexation gaps can quickly cap growth. Making thousands of additional pages visible to search engines expanded Popken’s searchable inventory, without requiring additional engineering effort.
Before Prerender.io, Popken had structured data implemented, but it wasn’t reliably visible to search engines because the required data loaded too late in the JavaScript lifecycle.
With Prerender.io in place, structured data is now consistently rendered before delivery to bots. As a result, Popken’s image carousels are appearing in SERPs. Reliable structured data directly improves SERP presence, CTR, and conversions, especially for large ecommerce catalogs.
At Popken’s scale, finances played a critical role in tool selection. By using Prerender.io instead of alternative solutions, Popken is reducing their tooling costs by up to 50%.
Prerender.io also reduced operational overhead by minimizing reliance on engineering resources.
But beyond cost-savings, the Popken Fashion Group also ran a test to measure the ROI of a stable rendering solution like Prerender.io. According to their calculations, Prerender.io is expected to bring Popken Fashion Group 10% greater projected sales revenue per year.
Ultimately, Prerender.io enables Popken to scale their SEO across international markets, save on tool costs, and grow their revenue—all with one plug-and-play solution.
“Shopping directly in LLMs doesn’t quite exist yet, but it will in the future. We’re using Prerender.io to help us stay visible in AI search when that day comes.”
Looking ahead, Popken is preparing a frontend migration to Angular—a move that traditionally carries significant SEO risk.
That risk is amplified in AI search environments, where bots often struggle even more with JavaScript-rendered content than traditional search engines like Googlebot or Bingbot.
As shopping and discovery increasingly shift toward LLM-driven experiences, the ability to render structured, machine-readable content will become critical for enterprise ecommerce brands.
With Prerender in place, Popken’s frontend teams can migrate to Angular with fewer SEO risks, and the organization is better positioned for LLM-based shopping and AI-driven discovery.
For Popken Fashion Group, Prerender is now a trusted, reliable piece of their enterprise SEO puzzle.
By ensuring search engines and AI search tools consistently receive fully rendered pages, Popken actively reduces ranking volatility across 30 domains, drives greater sales, and stabilizes visibility during technical changes—all while drastically reducing engineering dependency and tool costs.
For the future, Prerender also gives the team confidence to move forward with JavaScript-heavy frontend migration projects, while preparing for an AI-driven world where discovery increasingly happens through AI chatbots.
For enterprise SEO leaders managing large, JavaScript-heavy websites, Popken’s experience shows that cost savings, reliability, and future-proofing are not mutually exclusive.
