EdnaW
Member
I’ve had trouble getting Google to reliably index all my content, and I finally found a solution that helped me a lot. The tool is called Prerender, (I'll try my best to explain what it does but you should check it out) and it works by rendering your pages into static HTML snapshots, so Google sees the full text, images, and links without running the JavaScript; basically, that’s the kind of thing that makes indexing super smooth.
Here’s what I did: I added the Prerender middleware to my server and pointed it to my sitemap so it would crawl and cache all the URLs (you can set it to refresh weekly or daily). Once cached, any time a search engine bot hits my store, it gets served that pre-rendered HTML instantly, without waiting for JavaScript to load. My server response time for those bots dropped to under 50 ms on cached pages, and I'm feeling pretty confident that Google is seeing all the important stuff.
I also saw PageSpeed Insights scores shoot up (you can check here); many pages went from taking around 5 seconds to load for crawlers, down to just 0.05 seconds. (Needless to say, that definitely helped my Core Web Vitals and organic traffic.) *Important to mention: regular visitors still get the full interactive version, only bots get the cached snapshots.
Just wanted to share in case you’re struggling with indexing or slow speed on your blog or product pages - this has been a solid help in fixing JS crawl issues and giving Google the static view it prefers.
Here’s what I did: I added the Prerender middleware to my server and pointed it to my sitemap so it would crawl and cache all the URLs (you can set it to refresh weekly or daily). Once cached, any time a search engine bot hits my store, it gets served that pre-rendered HTML instantly, without waiting for JavaScript to load. My server response time for those bots dropped to under 50 ms on cached pages, and I'm feeling pretty confident that Google is seeing all the important stuff.
I also saw PageSpeed Insights scores shoot up (you can check here); many pages went from taking around 5 seconds to load for crawlers, down to just 0.05 seconds. (Needless to say, that definitely helped my Core Web Vitals and organic traffic.) *Important to mention: regular visitors still get the full interactive version, only bots get the cached snapshots.
Just wanted to share in case you’re struggling with indexing or slow speed on your blog or product pages - this has been a solid help in fixing JS crawl issues and giving Google the static view it prefers.