Dynamic rendering can effectively solve your JavaScript SEO problems, but Google recommends that it should be a workaround rather than a long-term solution.

Since this adds even more complexity to the creation of your website, it’s recommended to implement hydration, static rendering, or server-side rendering instead.

Both Bing and Google think dynamic rendering is important enough to tout it as a quick fix for Google Search’s JavaScript crawling and indexing problems.

This means web development teams and the technical SEO community need to understand the dynamic rendering process and why it should only be viewed as a temporary setup.

What is dynamic rendering?

Dynamic rendering combines the best of both worlds by presenting your JavaScript content differently.

Fully rendered content (a static HTML version of the pages) is submitted to search engines, while regular website visitors are served with normal (client-side rendered) content.

This rendering technique allows your website to dynamically detect crawlers like Googlebot and allows Google to crawl and index your content without running JavaScript.

By providing relevant websites to users and search engine bots, dynamic rendering helps minimize the crawl time required for each of your pages.

Not all websites need dynamic rendering, but how exactly does it work?

This is how dynamic rendering works

Implementing dynamic rendering can be challenging, resource-intensive, and time-consuming.

The dynamic rendering process typically works by providing the full JavaScript experience to users and the HTML files to search bots.

• An external dynamic renderer like Prerender.io is installed on the server to identify search crawlers.
• Requests from crawlers are forwarded to the renderer, which serves as a translation of the content suitable for the crawler (e.g. a static HTML version). This page is then cached for later use.
• A human user request is treated normally and forwarded to the website. You can also use this part of the dynamic rendering process to determine whether desktop or mobile content is required.

What problems can dynamic rendering solve?

Dynamic rendering helps Google crawl and index your site faster by picking out relevant JavaScript-generated content.

This means that search engines get pages faster, which means they can crawl more pages of your site – making more of your pages visible in search engine results pages (SERPs).

By removing the need for search engines to process JavaScript, you can optimize speed-related crawl budget issues and prevent search engines from overlooking your JavaScript-loaded content.

This makes the technique ideal for large websites that generate lots of content that is updated frequently (e.g. an e-commerce store with a rotating inventory).

More content indexed in Google will support your content marketing efforts and investments in organic search channels.

Should you still be using dynamic rendering?

Dynamic rendering is still great for large, JavaScript-heavy websites that are constantly evolving, but only as a short-term solution.

This is also beneficial for businesses that need to make the most of their crawling budget and have little technical resources.

Because it’s faster and less resource-intensive than server-side rendering, it’s also easier to deploy.

There are three cases where web developers should consider using dynamic rendering temporarily:

• If you have a large website with rapidly changing content that requires rapid indexing – This helps with rankings and increases traffic and sales.
• If your website relies on modern JavaScript functionalityDynamic rendering can overcome the limitations of processing JavaScript at scale while minimizing the number of HTTP requests.
• If your website relies on social media sharing and chatting applications that require access to page content – ​​embeddable social media walls, widgets, etc.

Is dynamic rendering cloaking?

Google describes cloaking as “sending different content or URLs to human users and search engines with the intention of manipulating search rankings and misleading users.”

It’s considered a black hat SEO tactic – for example, showing a page about dogs to users and a page about cats to crawlers.

Although dynamic rendering sends different content to both parties, its sole purpose is to pre-render your content for bots.

When you implement dynamic rendering, you minimize the differences between the version of the page you send to search bots and the version that is sent to users.

By providing the same end content to crawlers and human users, Google makes indexing easy, fast, and inexpensive.

How to use dynamic rendering as a workaround

According to Google, if your website contains JavaScript-generated content that isn’t available to search engines, dynamic rendering can be used as a workaround for the problem.

If your bots have trouble with JavaScript-generated content, use dynamic rendering to detect it and serve a server-rendered version without JavaScript. A client-side rendered version of the content is then presented to users.

On the other hand, dynamic rendering creates additional unnecessary complexities and resources for Google. Since many prerendering requests are generated, this can slow down your server significantly.

Dynamic rendering is not a viable option in the long run since it requires you to maintain two separate versions of your website.

You need to separately check if your website is well optimized for users and search bots. This costs your SEO and development teams valuable time that could be better spent elsewhere.

Finally, dynamic rendering means serving your customers a client-side rendered version of your website. If users have older devices that aren’t built to handle large amounts of JavaScript, it can result in poor page performance and a negative user experience.

Summary

Dynamic rendering is an ideal temporary way to fix your JavaScript SEO problems. Before you decide to do this, you should ask yourself the following questions:

• Is your website indexable?
• Does your website use JavaScript for some or all content?
• Does your content change regularly?
• Are you facing budget constraints?
• Is your engineering team too busy to implement server-side rendering?

There is dynamic rendering to fix web pages that don’t show up in search engine results pages. However, we always recommend server-side rendering.

Finally, maintaining only one version of a website is easier and more time-efficient because you don’t have to check that the versions for users and Googlebot are the same.

After you’ve balanced your development resources and technology capabilities, look for ways to move to server-side rendering so that all user-agents get the same content.

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