Read about whether to utilize dynamic rendering and what considerations you should make before using it to find the best temporary solution.
Dynamic rendering can successfully address your JavaScript SEO issues, but Google warns against using it as a long-term fix.
It is advised to use hydration, static rendering, or server-side rendering instead because it reduces complexity while designing your website.
Dynamic rendering is deemed significant enough by Google and Bing to be announced as a temporary solution to JavaScript’s difficulties with Google Search crawling and indexing.
This calls for an understanding of the dynamic rendering process and the reasons it should only be used as a temporary arrangement among web development teams and the technical SEO community.
What Is Dynamic Rendering?
With dynamic rendering, you may present your JavaScript content in a variety of ways, combining the best of both worlds.
While typical site users receive standard (client-side rendered) content, search engines receive fully-rendered material (a static HTML version of the pages).
This rendering method enables Google to crawl and index your material without running JavaScript by allowing your website to dynamically identify crawlers like Googlebot.
Dynamic rendering reduces the time needed to crawl each of your pages by presenting relevant websites to consumers and search engine bots.
Not all websites require dynamic rendering, but how does it function exactly?
How Dynamic Rendering Works
Dynamic rendering implementation can be difficult, time-consuming, and resource-intensive.
Typically, the JavaScript experience as a whole is served to consumers during the dynamic rendering process, whereas HTML files are served to search engine robots.
- identify search crawlers.
- Requests from crawlers are routed to the renderer, which serves as a translation of the content suitable for the crawler (such as a static HTML version). This page is then cached for later.
- A human user request is handled normally, sending them to the website. You can also use this part of the dynamic rendering process to determine if they require desktop or mobile content.
What Problems Can Dynamic Rendering Solve?
By highlighting the pertinent content produced by JavaScript, dynamic rendering enables Google to crawl and index your page more rapidly.
Search engines will now receive pages more quickly, allowing them to browse more of your website’s pages and displaying more of your pages in search engine results pages (SERPs).
You can improve speed-related crawl budget difficulties and stop search engines from missing your JavaScript-loaded content by removing the necessity for them to process JavaScript.
For large websites that produce a lot of information that is updated often (like an e-commerce store with a rotating inventory), this makes the strategy ideal.
Your content marketing initiatives and investment in organic search channels will benefit from more content that Google has indexed.
Should You Still Use Dynamic Rendering?
However, dynamic rendering should only be used as a temporary workaround for huge, JavaScript-heavy websites that are continuously changing.
Additionally, it’s advantageous for businesses who are short on engineering resources and need to make the most of their limited budget.
It is also simpler to implement than server-side rendering because it is quicker and uses fewer resources.
There are three circumstances in which site designers should momentarily use dynamic rendering:
- If you have a large site with rapidly changing content that requires quick indexing – this helps with rankings and driving traffic and revenue.
- If your website relies on modern JavaScript functionality, dynamic 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 chat applications that require access to page content – embeddable social media walls, widgets, etc.
Is Dynamic Rendering Cloaking?
Cloaking, according to Google, is the practice of “sending different content or URLs to human users and search engines with the intent to manipulate search rankings and mislead users.”
For instance, providing a website about dogs to humans and a page about cats to crawlers is seen as a black hat SEO technique.
Dynamic rendering is only used to pre-render your content for bots, even if it transmits distinct content to each party.
Reduce the disparities between the version of the page you submit to search bots and the version that humans see if you decide to employ dynamic rendering.
Google can index easily, swiftly, and affordably by providing the same final material to crawlers and human users.
How To Use Dynamic Rendering As A Workaround
According to Google, dynamic rendering can be utilized as a workaround if your website contains JavaScript-generated material that is inaccessible to search engines.
Use dynamic rendering to identify your bots’ issues with JavaScript-generated material and deliver a server-rendered version sans JavaScript if your bots have trouble with it. The users are subsequently presented with a client-side rendered version of the content.
On the other hand, dynamic rendering demands more resources and adds unnecessary complexity for Google. It can severely slow down your server because it generates a lot of pre-rendering requests.
As you must maintain two different versions of your site, dynamic rendering isn’t a long-term solution.
Your SEO and development teams’ valuable time would be better used elsewhere if you had to independently check that your website is optimized for both users and search engines.
Last but not least, dynamic rendering entails serving a client-side rendered version of your website to users. Users may encounter poor page performance and a bad user experience if they use outdated devices that aren’t designed to handle a lot of JavaScript.
Summary
Dynamic rendering is an ideal temporary way to mend your JavaScript SEO problems. Before you decide to go ahead with it, ask yourself the following questions:
- Is your website indexable?
- Does your website use JavaScript for some or all of its content?
- Does your content change regularly?
- Are you facing budget constraints?
- Does your engineering team have too much on their plate to implement server-side rendering?
Although dynamic rendering can be used to fix web pages that don’t appear on search engine results pages, server-side rendering is always preferred.
After all, having just one version of a website saves time because you don’t have to check to make sure that the versions for users and Googlebot are the same.
To ensure that all user agents see the same content, consider switching to server-side rendering after weighing your development resources and technological capabilities.
