Example Pre-rendering Configurations#

Our Node.js prerendercloud middleware and our prerendercloud-server are configured with sensible defaults but also support a variety of pre-rendering configurations. Here is how to think about the major levers you can pull to configure pre-rendering:

1. What traffic do you want to pre-render?
   • all traffic (default)
   • bots only user-agents (most common)
   • custom user-agent(s)
2. What content do you want to pre-render?
   • the entire page (default)
   • only the meta tags (open graph and meta), see prerender-meta-only option
3. How do you want to pre-render?
   • forward traffic to our service (default, our service is fast but this is typically used with local caching)
   • build all HTML in a batch process on a schedule and deploy to your origin
4. Caching
   • no local/middleware, and yes 5-minute (configurable) TTL of headless-render-api cache (default)
   • yes local/middleware, and no headless-render-api cache
   • yes local/middleware, and headless-render-api cache

Real World Examples#

• I have an Angular/React/Vue/etc app that Google refuses to index. I want to pre-render all traffic to it.
• I want to pre-render googlebot only.
• I want to pre-render all traffic except googlebot
• I want to pre-render but strip out all script tags because I don't care about client SPA functionality, see prerender-remove-script-tags
• I want to pre-render the meta tags only because I only care about fixing link previews when someone pastes a link to my site on Facebook, Twitter, Slack, etc., see prerender-meta-only
• I have very specific requirements for when and what to pre-render, see shouldPrerenderAdditionalCheck: (req) => req.headers['user-agent'].match(/custom-stuff/) in our Node.js middleware