Encited

Custom render user agent

To pre-render a page, Encited opens it in a browser and reads the finished HTML. By default that browser identifies itself with a standard Chrome user agent. A custom render user agent replaces it with a value you choose.

Custom render user agents are included on the Business, Agency, and Enterprise plans.

Use it when:

  • Your firewall or bot protection blocks the renderer, and you want to allow it by user agent.
  • Your site serves different content by user agent, and you want snapshots of one version.
  • You want renderer visits to be easy to find or filter in your own server logs and analytics.

Set the user agent#

  1. In your site, open Site settings.

  2. Under Cache & routing, open Render user agent.

  3. Enter the user agent, for example:

    Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/124.0 Safari/537.36 EncitedRenderer

  4. Click Save changes.

To go back to the default, clear the field and click Save changes.

Rules#

  • Up to 256 characters.
  • Printable ASCII characters only, on one line.

When it applies#

Encited sends the custom user agent every time it renders a page on your site: first renders, scheduled refreshes, and re-renders you start yourself. It also goes on the requests that read your sitemap.

SEO Spider audits are not affected. They always identify as Encited-SEOAuditBot.

Pages that are already cached keep their current snapshot until their next render. To get new snapshots right away, go to Pre-rendering and click Re-render.

If your site serves different pages by user agent, check a snapshot after you change it. A value your device detection does not recognize can send renders down a different path, and that version is what crawlers get.

If your plan changes to one that does not include this setting, Encited goes back to the default user agent. Your saved value is kept and is used again if you upgrade.

Allowing the renderer through a firewall#

A user agent is easy to copy, so do not use it as the only check. Also set a Render token in Site settings. Encited sends it in the x-encited-token header on every render, so your firewall can allow requests that carry both the user agent and the token. See Detect Encited visits.