What Is Dynamic Rendering? How Does It Impact SEO?

Have you ever wondered why certain websites emerge in search results while others remain hidden? The answer might be as simple as dynamic rendering.

But what exactly is this technological magic, and how could it affect your website’s SEO performance?

Let’s go into dynamic rendering to understand how it affects how search engines see and rank our web pages.

What is Dynamic Rendering?

Websites benefit from dynamic rendering, which functions similarly to a chameleon. It’s a smart method in which your website changes its appearance based on who is looking at it. A regular user sees all the showy aspects, such as animations, interactive components, etc.

However, when a search engine bot starts crawling about, the site swiftly changes to a simpler, no-frills version that the machine understands.

However, being dishonest is not the point. It’s more like knowing two languages fluently. For human visitors, the site communicates in rich, interactive JavaScript. For search engine bots, it uses basic, easy-to-read HTML.

This dual-personality method handles a major problem with current websites. It allows programmers to create amazing, feature-rich websites for customers while avoiding search engine issues.

So, in simple terms, dynamic rendering allows your website to be both a people charmer and a bot whisperer simultaneously. It’s a situation that benefits everyone and might help your website gain weight in search engine rankings.

Is Dynamic Rendering the Same as Cloaking?

Cloaking and dynamic rendering are opposite concepts. One is a useful tool, while the other is a risky bet. Stick to dynamic rendering and maintain consistency in your content, and you’ll be on Google’s good side.

Cloaking is like showing a page about pizza to users and a page about burgers to crawlers. It’s all about deceiving search engines and presenting users with different results. This is the reason it is considered a black hat-SEO tactic.

As stated by Google:

“Googlebot does not view dynamic rendering as cloaking. As long as your dynamic rendering generates the same, Googlebot won’t consider it as cloaking.

When you set up dynamic rendering, your website may generate error pages. Googlebot does not consider these error pages to be cloaking and instead considers them as any other error page.

Cloaking is the practice of serving distinct content to users and crawlers using dynamic rendering. Cloaking may be defined as a website that offers a page about cats to people and a page about dogs to crawlers.”

Does Google Recommend Dynamic Rendering?

In 2018, Google tentatively approved dynamic rendering. Their response was: “Okay if you’ve got a site that’s drowning in JavaScript and search engines are giving you the nod of approval, then dynamic rendering can be a choice.”

But in 2022, Google’s tune changed slightly. They’ve recently stated, “Dynamic rendering was good for an extremely busy moment, but it’s not your forever solution.” They urge for alternate choices, such as server-side rendering, which they believe is easier to maintain and produces more trustworthy results.

How Dynamic Rendering Works?

Establishing dynamic rendering can be a very challenging task as it needs a lot of time, resources, and some technical knowledge. A qualified and experienced development team is necessary to create a system that confirms the identity of each agent who visits the website and selects which sort of material to deliver.

Dynamic rendering may be implemented in three steps.

• To begin, install a dynamic renderer (for example, Prerender) to convert your dynamic content into static HTML.

• Second, you select the user agents that you believe should receive static content. Typically, this includes search engine crawlers such as Googlebot and Bingbot. You may want to incorporate others, such as LinkedInbot.

• If your prerendering service causes your server to slow down or your HTTP requests to grow, you should consider creating a cache. Next, evaluate if your user agents need desktop or mobile content. You may provide them with a suitable solution by using dynamic serving.

At last, enable your servers to send static HTML.

After the implementation process, you have to make sure that dynamic rendering is working properly or not. Here are a few items to check:

• Mobile-Friendly Test

This is one of Google Search Console’s set of tools. In September 2020 Google switched to mobile-first indexing for all domains  We can say Google prioritizes the mobile version of your website above the desktop one. For that reason, your website must be optimized for a mobile-first experience.

• Use URL Inspection Tool

To ensure your website is properly scanned and indexed use the URL inspection tool will do exactly that.

• Fetch as Google

This is what you’ll use to assess the performance of your dynamic renderer. It helps you to ensure that each URL is correctly submitted for indexing.

What Types of Websites Benefit Most from Dynamic Rendering?

Now it is time to decide which are the websites that benefit from dynamic rendering:

• Those websites that mainly depend on modern JavaScript features.
• Large sites with continuously changing content that require speedy indexing.
• E-commerce platforms with continuously changing stock and catalogs.
• Websites with social media sharing and chat programs that need access to page content, as well as those with crawl-budget issues, particularly for large sites.
• Websites with information that varies depending on user choices or location.
• Those websites where using server-side rendering is difficult due to low engineering resources or funding limitations.

Now it is time to think whether to go for dynamic rendering, here are some questions  to help: 

• Is your website’s content dynamic and changes quickly?
• Is JavaScript required to render all or some of your content?
• Are you encountering crawl-budget troubles due to huge or dynamic content?
• Does the server load exceed acceptable bandwidth, or does it affect dynamic content rendering?

However, it’s worth noting that dynamic rendering isn’t required for every website. It is largely a workaround for indexable, public JavaScript-generated material that changes often or employs JavaScript capabilities that are not supported by some crawlers. Before introducing dynamic rendering, investigate whether there are better, more long-term options for your unique case.

How Does Dynamic Rendering Help with SEO?

The main goal of dynamic rendering is to improve web pages that do not appear on SERPs.

As it is seen users are complaining that Google is not indexing all or some of their sites, which ultimately impacts their SEO because they cannot rank.

In response to that Google said that the major reason for not being able to index part or all information is the presence of Javascript on specific websites. On the one hand, this has an impact on website SEO in general. Also, Google cannot change its crawl budget. This takes us to Dynamic Rendering, which solves both difficulties.

Starting with crawl budgets, major search engines such as Bing and Google restrict the amount of time their crawlers may spend on a single page. They establish a time restriction called the crawl budget, which varies for each website. 

Googlebot crawling your website is an important part of any SEO strategy. SEO is the practice of ranking in SERPs to increase traffic to your website. Before you can appear in SERPs, your site must be crawled and indexed. If the Googlebot isn’t crawling and indexing your site, your SEO is pointless. 

Conclusion

So let’s wrap up!

By now we understand what Dynamic rendering is and how it enables simple crawling and indexing of websites based on the searcher’s intent.

But keep this in mind. Dynamic rendering isn’t for everyone. But if your website demands it, carrying out the method might make a significant impact.

A quick flat HTML rendering designed exclusively for crawl bots helps solve crawl budget challenges while significantly improving user experience, particularly on JavaScript-heavy websites with a lot of information.

FAQs

1. What Is Dynamic Rendering?

Dynamic rendering indicates that your site will render differently depending on who calls it; people will view the standard client-side version of the site, while search engine bots will see a version tailored to them. It’s one of the most significant modifications Google has done in the last decade.

2. Is it necessary for all websites to use Dynamic Rendering?

The websites that can benefit the most from dynamic rendering are those that are large, include extensive Javascript, and have a large number of pages to index.

3. Why hasn’t the SEO community adopted Dynamic Rendering?

Dynamic rendering is a technical challenge, and many SEO companies aren’t focused on technical SEO activities or do not have developers on their staff.