Is it possible for response times to increase after integrating with Prerender.io?
Initial response times may be slower while Prerender.io scans, renders, and caches your site — especially for large websites.
It’s normal to see slightly higher response times right after integrating with Prerender. This usually happens because Prerender needs time to scan, render, and cache your entire site before the full performance benefits become noticeable.
It's worth mentioning that serving a page for the first time to Prerender takes longer than serving it to a crawler directly because it's likely that the e.g. Googlebot isn't rendering the page for the first time (it's relying on a cached version).
Can you do anything about this?
- Make Prerender aware of all the pages that need caching as soon as possible by uploading an accurate Sitemap.
- Ensure Prerender ignores 404 pages and doesn't waste time crawling them. In general, it's worth keeping in mind that in case of pages that return status codes 3xx, 4xx or 5xx, the response time always going to be higher, due to the fact the page will not be cached.
- Exclude pages and search parameters that don't need to be delivered to crawlers.
- Be patient. Depending on your website's size this process could take days or even longer if you have a lot of pages not included in the sitemaps.
How website size affects caching speed
The time it takes to fully cache your site depends heavily on the number of pages. With large sites (50,000+ pages) caching can take multiple days before all pages benefit from instant response times.
Once your site has been fully cached, you should see a significant improvement in performance compared to the initial integration period.
Has it been weeks since you activated Prerender but the page times are still slow? Please contact us at support@prerender.io and we'll help you understand what's happening.