Prerender all the Things.

In this Post I want to cover what prerendering is, and how you can use it in Netlify.

Let's go! 🌘

What is prerendering?

When you hava a React, Angular or Vue App, most of the time, it is client-side rendered.

The client receives an empty HTML shell, and loads the content via JavaScript.

Search Engines normally don't execute JavaScript when they index a page.
That changed in recent years with Google, but still, you can't really rely on them to render your application properly.

This is where prerendering comes into play.
The server recieves a request.
It checks the user agent, if it's a normal browser user agent, the server responds with the HTML Shell.

But if it is a Search Engine Crawler that requests the page, the Server responds with a prerendered HTML file.