What's pre-rendering?
Why pre-render?#
Interactive pages and single page applications work well for humans visiting the site in a modern browser that can render anything, but they are invisible to crawlers because most crawlers including those used by ChatGPT (GPTBot), Claude (Claudebot), some of Google's own crawlers and a bunch of others cannot execute JavaScript. So if your page or parts of your page relies on JavaScript to show content like tabs, click to reveal texts, modals and drawers, FAQs, chances are those are never picked by these crawlers.
Pre-rendering closes that gap and it has been the most widely used workaround for this issue. How it works is that you pre-render your pages into plain HTML or Markdown in advance or on schedule and store it somewhere that you can pull and serve fast when bots visit those pages. That way crawlers and AI engines get the fully rendered HTML for every page while your visitors keep getting your site exactly as it is today, so you won't change how the site is built.
There are multiple different approaches to this like pre-rendering during build time, pre-rendering on schedule, on-demand rendering and more. Encited builds on top of the existing methods and optimizes it for delivery. Encited combines pre-rendering on schedule and on-demand rendering with lightning fast CDN and edge caching to achieve as low as <15ms response time to crawlers. So, your pages are never skipped by AI agents with 499 status codes due to slow responses times and less likely to get stuck in "Discovered, not indexed" state.
Setup methods#
Encited Edge#
Encited offers a managed, lightning fast edge proxy which pairs well with our CDN caching, independent of your infrastructure and server framework. Encited Edge works by pointing your domain's A records to our edge server IPs and is usually faster to set up. Learn more about Encited Edge.
Pre-rendering API#
Encited supports the traditional middleware setups, with a guide for every edge platform, server framework, site builder and store platform we cover.
Edge middleware
AI website builders
Ecommerce
Server frameworks