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Prerendering

Please consider using our new Prerender Extension for better visibility and performance, instead of the older Beta feature documented below.

If your public-facing site is a single-page app (SPA), many non-human clients may not see its full content.

SPAs rely on client-side JavaScript to render pages, leaving the HTML body mostly empty. While this works for browsers and major search engines like Google, many tools - such as AI agents, chat services, and crawlers - cannot run JavaScript. Even search engines that do run JavaScript may penalize slow-loading pages, lowering SEO scores.

Websites using Server-Side Rendering (SSR) or Static Site Generation (SSG) avoid these issues, though some use a hybrid approach.

If your site requires client-side rendering but you want content accessible to crawlers and AI tools, use pre-rendering (or our new extension) to serve fully rendered pages.

Set up prerendering

Section titled “Set up prerendering”

Netlify comes with built-in prerendering. You can enable it for your site at Project configuration Build & deploy Post processing Prerendering.

Enabling Netlify’s built-in prerendering.

Our built-in prerendering service will cache prerendered pages for between 24 and 48 hours; this is not adjustable.

External services

Section titled “External services”

This feature is available on all Pro and Enterprise plans.

You can also use external services that can automate prerendering for you:

If you want to use an external service, send us an email at support@netlify.com to let us know which service you’re using and its API token, and we’ll get you set up.

How it works

Section titled “How it works”

We’ve taken great care to implement support for prerendering in the most efficient manner possible.

When a request hits one of our CDN servers, our CDN software determines if it’s a prerendering request from a crawler. If prerendering is enabled for your site, our cache servers will contact the prerendering backend straight from our CDN nodes instead of serving the normal cached request.