Pre-rendering should apply to social-sharing crawlers

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1

Currently, it seems prerendering only kicks in for search engine crawlers. However, an equally important application of prerendering is for social link sharing - think in the context of twitter, facebook, slack, etc.

These sites’ crawlers fetch the site contents and determine the title, image, and other metadata from the response - since Netlify returns the Javascript bundle as opposed to the rendered html, these sites end up not understanding the meta contents of the page and showing a poor link preview.

My guess is it should be a low-lift change wherein you expand the user agent header regex to more than just search engines.

2

@dgh312 I believe you probably meant to put this in the Features section as a feature-request

As I understand it, the pre-rendering service that Netlify provides is more likely to be deprecated than updated.

You can see further information in this thread:

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3

Thanks for the context. That’s unfortunate and puzzling. The UI and wording of the prerender feature in documentation (Last updated: October 18, 2023) suggest this is a feature being actively developed, albeit in Beta mode:

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

Additionally, the wording on the dashboard clearly suggests that social media sharing is supported:

Enable prerendering to allow crawlers used by search engines and social networks to see the pages rendered by your app.

I think the imminent deprecation should be strongly suggested in the dashboard to avoid misleading developers.

4

You’re using prerendering. The latter is not working and we don’t expect it to change any time soon

The fact that documentation and the verbiage on the dashboard do not in the slightest suggest that the feature is not working (in fact, the opposite is hinted at) is concerning and misleading enough to have to leave Netlify. Built-in prerendering was the primary reason I switched to Netlify.

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I don’t believe Netlify have said it’s getting deprecated themselves yet, let alone that it’s imminent.
It’s only me that’s mentioned it, purely as a wild guess, and I’m entirely unaffiliated with Netlify.

I’ve never used it myself.
As I understand it does “work” albeit it has issues.

Netlify do mention in that thread that Pro plan or above can use prerender.io
Which may or may not be applicable for your account/project.

I just wanted you to be aware of the general situation regarding Netlify’s Prerender service.

6

Pre-rendring already works for social sharing crawlers.