Disable pre-rendering on publish - consequences for SEO and indexing

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1

I recently opened a ticket due to some frontend bugs, and the suggested solution was to disable pre-rendering during project publishing. However, I noticed in the description of this setting that it mentions search engines may take longer to index pages if this option is used.

We’re dealing with a growing amount of dynamic content on our site and want to ensure it gets indexed properly by search engines.

Can anyone clarify:

  • Why do search engines take longer to index pages when pre-rendering is disabled?
  • Does this affect only new, unindexed pages or also already indexed pages?
  • How much longer does indexing take compared to using pre-rendering?
  • Could disabling pre-rendering reduce the chances of search engines indexing new pages or slow down the overall indexing process?

Thanks for any insights!

Screenshot 2024-10-23 at 18.29.02
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Hi @morpheus
Pre-rendering creates a static version of your pages that search engines can read immediately. Without it, search engines need to wait for JavaScript to load and execute to see your content - like when waiting for a page to fully load in a browser. Indexing gets slower, especially for new pages.

If SEO is important for your site, it’s better to keep re-rendering. If you need to turn it off, new content might take longer to show up in search results - maybe days or weeks longer depending on the search engine. This is not a WeWeb limitation; it’s how search engines work. For instance, Google handles JavaScript content well.

Basically:

  1. Keep pre-rendering ON if you need pages indexed as fast as possible
  2. Turn it OFF if faster build times are more important than quick indexing
  3. Either way, your content will eventually be indexed properly, because disabling pre-rendering WON’T hurt your SEO ranking quality
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@danlopes
After disablind pre-rendering our ranking for relevant keywords we optimizing for went from page 1 to page 3, reenabled the pre-rendering again and it started moving slowly up again, but seems like in your recent update you completely disabled the pre-rendering, now we are on the page 3 again…

Is there no way anymore to serve content of the page without running JS? It’s killing our SEO and costs us a lot of money currently.

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