Get Started

Ready to launch your Prerender account? This guide helps outline what you need to do to get started.

Here are the four main steps:

1. Complete Signup
2. Finish Integration Guide
3. Adjust Query Parameters
4. Review Sitemaps

1. Complete Your Signup

To register for your Prerender account, click the Get Started button at the top right of our home page. If you have already created an account, move onto the next step.

2. Finish The Integration Guide

After you create your account, you will need to integrate your website. This ensures that any search engine bots are redirected to Prerender so we can serve them your pages. View our easy integration guide for more information on integration.

Note: Prerender will only serve pages to bots—human visitors should not be affected. If the integration is complete, you can check if it works by changing your user agent to Googlebot and reloading the page. A detailed guide on this can be found here.
This way, you can also check if the pages are cached correctly.

3. Adjust Your Query Parameters

It's important to review your query parameters so that you don't waste your renders on low-value pages. For example, we suggest ignoring all query parameters that do not affect your page's content. This step is vital to optimize your Prerender usage in the long run and help you save costs over time.

The default settings ignore the most common tracking URL parameters. You can choose to ignore additional URL parameters (Ignore specific query parameters) or all query parameters (Ignore all query parameters) or select particular exceptions while ignoring everything else (Only cache specific query parameters).

How does it work?

Prerender will cache all unique URLs. If the path of two URLs is identical but the parameter part of the URL is different, Prerender will handle them as two separate URLs.

This is useful in case of URL parameters that change the page's contents. However, there might be URL parameters that don't affect the page's contents, so caching them separately is not practical.
Prerender has the option to ignore query parameters. If a URL is requested with an ignored query parameter, Prerender will serve the URL without a URL parameter. Suppose a bot requests this URL: https://example.com/category?param=1  with "param" being ignored. Prerender will serve https://example.com/category to the bot.

The setting will take effect in an hour, and the corresponding URLs will be removed from the cache two hours after the parameter is added.

4. Review Sitemaps

Submitting your sitemaps to Prerender allows you to cache your pages before the bots access them and automatically include new ones in the cache. This way, you will experience the benefits of Prerender sooner.

When a bot requests a page, Prerender retrieves it quickly from the cache. However, if the page is not cached, Prerender must fetch it from your server and render it before delivering it to the bot. This process is known as a cache miss render. In this situation, the response time is significantly slower.

You can add your sitemaps from the Sitemap menu from the Prerender dashboard.

Once your sitemap is added, Prerender will crawl the Sitemap by the interval you set up and add any new, uncached URLs to the cache.
Pages already cached will not be recached when the sitemap is recrawled. 

You can read more about the Sitemap feature here. 

After you have added your first sitemap, we recommend checking whether it can be crawled by Prerender. To do this, click the eye icon next to the sitemap, then select the "Crawl Now" button at the top. Verify if the sitemap can be accessed and crawled. If the crawl is unsuccessful, you will see "Failed" in the Status column, and with the button next to it, you should see the reason that might stand behind the failed crawl.

Have more questions? Access our support team from within the Prerender console and we'll be happy to help.