FAQs
Prerendering is a complex subject, and it’s not always easy to understand its importance for an enterprise website or single-page application’s organic success. But after years of working with clients of every size—and in every industry—we’ve decided to compile the most common questions in one place. Pin this as your hub for all things dynamic rendering.
Find out more about Prerender.io, technical SEO, JavaScript, and more.
There are three major reasons to optimize the rendering of your JS site:
1. Search engines can’t handle JavaScript content correctly – in most cases, search engines take 9x longer to crawl and index JS-based pages than regular HTML sites. This leads to a lot of issues like missing content, limited crawl budgets, and lower rankings. By prerendering your pages, you’ll solve all JS SEO issues from its root.
2. PageSpeed impacts your rankings – unresponsive, slow pages are frustrating for everyone, including search bots, and JavaScript has the biggest impact in loading times. To increase your site’s chances of getting into the first spots in search results, your pages need to load in 1 – 2 seconds or less. Prerender nails this by delivering your pages in 0,03 seconds on average.
3. Most rendering solutions are expensive, hard to implement, and have negative effects that are difficult to work around – traditional solutions like server-side rendering require a minimum of $100k in upfront investment to cover server equipment, software infrastructure, and engineering time, and still have a negative impact on your site’s time to first byte (TTFB) and first input delay (FID).
In contrast, Prerender.io takes just a couple of hours to install and test and will get you near-perfect SEO scores for a fraction of the cost and with none of the drawbacks.
The short answer is yes, but indirectly. Prerender is designed to help solve all JavaScript-related issues for enterprise and single-page application sites.
This means your pages will get higher performance scores (which is a confirmed ranking factor), increase crawl budget and speed up the indexing and re-indexing of your website. These benefits alone can take you further on your SEO journey than any manual workarounds.
However, your site’s rankings are determined by a plethora of factors like content and backlinks. Prerender will give you a solid foundation for your SEO campaign by handling the challenges of JavaScript optimization, allowing you to focus on other essential factors.
Taking advantage of the rendering process, Prerender.io scores your page’s technical optimization and allows you to detect optimization opportunities or technical SEO issues that can affect your site’s SEO performance.
You’ll also be able to monitor metrics like Prerender’s time to fully load your pages, which can be a great benchmark to understand how the end user (aka your customers) will experience your site and optimize it accordingly.
Unlike other JS solutions, Prerender.io doesn’t render your page – necessarily – every time a crawler requests it. Instead, it renders and stores your pages in its cache to be delivered at the moment the request comes in.
This process occurs in two scenarios:
1.) The first time Prerender finds a URL in your submitted sitemap or the first time a crawler requests a page that hasn’t been cached yet. 2.) After the time set expires, Prerender will recache your page to update the current version and pick on any changes and improvements made to it. Every caching task consumes one cache/recache included in your monthly plan.
The best part of using Prerender is that it is an automated process. Although you can submit a sitemap to speed up the rendering process of critical URLs, the Prerender’s middleware installed on your back will detect any request coming from a recognized crawler and generate a cached version for every URL requested without needing further configuration.
That way, the service will scale as your site scales automatically – which is ideal when, for example, you can’t predict all URLs in advance.
Most AI crawlers, like ChatGPT or Perplexity, can’t run JavaScript-generated pages. If your content (e.g., product pricing, inventory, or tabs) loads via JS, AI tools see a blank page—so your site won’t appear in their answers.
Google can often process JavaScript content better than AI crawlers. This means that even if you rank high on Google, AI tools may not see your content, so it doesn’t get featured in AI-generated answers.
Many AI crawlers cannot read JavaScript content, causing key AEO elements like product details, pricing, or reviews to go unseen. And if AI bots can’t see your content, it won’t appear in AI-driven answers. Content prerendering with Prerender.io solves this by ensuring your JS content is visible to AI crawlers, improving your eligibility for AI search exposure.
Most AI crawlers don’t execute JavaScript. They depend on HTML to read and understand your pages. If your site is built with JavaScript, it is likely that AI crawlers can’t see your content unless you optimize it with prerendering. Prerender.io renders your content, making it compatible with both search engines (Google) and AI platforms (ChatGPT). Learn more about how to get featured on AI searches.
Most AI search engines (like Google’s AI Overviews or ChatGPT) can’t process and fetch website content built with JavaScript, causing your content to not appear in search results. Prerender.io solves this by turning your JS content into its HTML version, a format that AI bots can easily read. This makes it easier for your site to be featured in AI-generated answers, summaries, and featured search results. Get details on AI search optimization with Prerender.io.
Prerender.io makes your website more AI-friendly by ensuring that AI tools can “see” all the key details on your site (like product info, pricing, or reviews) so no content will be skipped.
Many sites use JavaScript to load these details, but most AI crawlers can’t process JavaScript. Prerender.io fixes this by turning those pages into plain HTML, a format AI and LLM platforms can easily include in their answers. Learn more about how Prerender.io improves AI search results.
Many Prerender.io customers see AI visibility improvements within weeks, including more AI crawlers visiting your site and your content appearing in AI-generated answers.
Prerender.io is one of the best JavaScript AEO tools. This prerendering solution is built specifically for JavaScript websites that aim to improve their visibility in AI search.
It handles thousands of rendering tasks at scale and supports most JavaScript frameworks. Prerender.io also offers key AEO features like custom caching rules, 404 detection, and crawling and indexing reports. And with the affordable pricing, Prerender.io is accessible to businesses of all sizes. See Prerender.io’s pricing plans.
To accelerate your website’s indexing process, consider these strategies:
Discover more tips on how to accelerate web page indexing here.
To ensure a seamless mobile experience for your users, follow these best practices:
For a comprehensive guide to mobile-friendly website development, follow this guide.
There are four techniques to optimize your ReactJS website for healthier SEO performance:
Learn more about ReactJS SEO optimization tips here.
We use a technique called dynamic rendering, which can be considered an advanced version of prerendering. Prerender fetches all the necessary resources to build your pages and caches a pre-rendered version of them.
When a new request is sent to your page, Prerender’s middleware will determine whether it’s a search bot or a human user asking for your page: if it’s a search crawler like Googlebot, it’ll send the cached version to make it easier for search engines to crawl and index its content. If it’s a human user, they will get redirected through your normal server routes solving all JavaScript-related SEO issues and allowing you to provide an immersive, JavaScript-rich experience to customers. Learn the full details of Prerender’s process.
Usually, this question comes from developers and business owners worried about cloaking penalizations. Let us reassure you that there’s no risk at all. In fact, Prerender.io has been a recommended choice by Google.
Prerender.io does not change any content on your page. It just renders the HTML file and all resources and delivers the result to crawlers – users and Googlebot or GPTBot will receive the same content.
On the other hand, cloaking is about misleading search engines to index a page for irrelevant keywords by serving crawlers one type of content and providing people with a totally different page when they click the link in search results.
No! We help you get found wherever your audience searches, from Google to Reddit to ChatGPT. Some default bots include:
prerender.crawlerUserAgents = [
‘googlebot’,
‘Yahoo! Slurp’,
‘bingbot’,
‘yandex’,
‘baiduspider’,
‘facebookexternalhit’,
‘twitterbot’,
‘rogerbot’,
‘linkedinbot’,
’embedly’,
‘quora link preview’,
‘showyoubot’,
‘outbrain’,
‘pinterest/0.’,
‘developers.google.com/+/web/snippet’,
‘slackbot’,
‘vkShare’,
‘W3C_Validator’,
‘redditbot’,
‘Applebot’,
‘WhatsApp’,
‘flipboard’,
‘tumblr’,
‘bitlybot’,
‘SkypeUriPreview’,
‘nuzzel’,
‘Discordbot’,
‘Google Page Speed’,
‘Qwantify’,
‘pinterestbot’,
‘Bitrix link preview’,
‘XING-contenttabreceiver’,
‘Chrome-Lighthouse’,
‘TelegramBot’,
‘SeznamBot’,
];
Learn how to add additional bots to the list, including AI crawlers.
Yes!
No matter what JavaScript framework or technologies your backend was built with, Prerender.io integrates with any modern tech stack. You won’t have to rewrite your code or change anything from your setup.
For a full list of Prerender.io integrations, visit our documentation.
To integrate Prerender.io with a Bubble.io app, you’ll need a custom plan that includes a dedicated server so you’re able to install our middleware.
Standard plans won’t be able to integrate with Prerender.
On average, Prerender.io takes 2 to 4 hours to install and test to ensure everything is working properly. It doesn’t require extensive knowledge, and our team will support you every step of the way if needed. Find the installation instructions based on your tech stack.
Dynamic rendering refers to the process of serving content based on what the user agent requests. Search engine crawlers get static HTML, and humans get dynamic JavaScript content. Dynamic rendering is implemented to optimize the indexing quality of JS content, while still serving interactive JS-based websites to users.
You can build your own dynamic rendering solution, such as SSR, or adopt a plug-and-play solution like Prerender.io.
SSR refers to generating the HTML version of your JavaScript pages on the SSR server, before sending them to the user’s browser. This way your JS content is indexed and loaded quickly.
The initial cost of building an SSR system is estimated to start at $120,000. This estimate includes expenses for technical expertise, infrastructure, and other resources.
It’s important to remember that SSR requires ongoing maintenance, and scaling it will demand more advanced infrastructure and additional development time. Learn more about the requirements for building an in-house SSR here.
Choosing between Prerender.io and Botify depends on your specific needs. Here’s a breakdown:
So, if you’re looking for a tool to improve the indexing quality of your JavaScript-based site and its JS SEO performance, Prerender.io is a better choice.
JavaScript could be hurting your bottom line more than you think. Try our free ROI calculator to see how much you could make by fixing your JavaScript SEO and AEO issues.
Serving +2.7 billion pages to crawlers.
