Site: stalwart-cheesecake-2ad00c
Stack: gohugo, v0.147.0 (same behaviour with 0.92.0)
Today I decided to investigate some 502/504 errors that were reported for ~20% of the requests coming to the site from crawlers that I had some visibility of (Google Search Console, AHRefs, Bing webmaster tools).
AHrefs used to report 90%+ health scores before February 2025, but they suddenly started dropping without any changes to my site. Google Search console started reporting similar crawling errors.
The only difference between the last two crawls was disabling the Netlify prerending checkbox in the âBuild and Deploy â Post processingâ section in the site config.
Itâs possible there may still be something else wrong, and if so Netlify will likely address.
But just something to be aware of, as it has never had the Beta flag removed in the documentation:
As Nathan said, prerendering is in beta, so we donât recommend using it for mission critical sites. We recommend using a third-party service such as prerender.io.
Thank you @nathanmartin and @sid.m.
A small request to the Netlify team: could you please make the beta expectations public? It is surprising to me that a service that is, very optimistically, failing to serve 15% of requests is called âbetaâ. So, given that the concept is subject to interpretation, could you clarify it in the docs? Thank you,
I donât have access to logs, Im on free tier. Since the 7th of June I have been trying to solve issues with the Google crawl bots. After reading your discussion on the topic I disabled the prerendering. Immediately after I retested several Google crawl bots and everything is working now. Thanks for the info. Hope this confirmation of the issueis useful for others with the same issues.
