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What should I do if I'm experiencing high volumes of unwanted renders?

This guide explains how to identify and resolve unwanted renders and enhance the efficiency of your Prerender setup.

Overview

Unwanted renders occur when unnecessary or unintended URLs are being processed by Prerender, leading to inefficiencies and increased costs. If you're experiencing high volumes of unwanted renders with Prerender, it’s important to address the issue promptly to optimize performance and control costs. 

Note: It's important to understand that Prerender renders your pages when there are requests from the bots. The integration redirects bot requests to our service. 

Possible Causes / Scenarios

  • You have multiple query parameters that don't change the content of the page.
  • You have soft404 pages.
  • Extensions are being redirected to our service.
  • Bot requests for error pages.

  • Internal URLs are forwarded to Prerender.

Solutions/Tips

  • Modify your integration to exclude specific URLs from being redirected to Prerender. This ensures that only relevant pages are cached and served to the bots. The viability and exact implementation depend on how your integration is implemented and also on the nature of the unwanted URLs.

  • Use the Ignore URL feature. This prevents Prerender from processing unwanted URLs by adding them to the Ignore URL filter. You can add a url pattern to be ignored or add a query parameter to be ignored:
    1. Log in to your Prerender account.
    2. Navigate to Cache Manager > Ignore URL Filters.
    3. Add the URLs pattern or query parameters to exclude from rendering.

When a url pattern is ignored, Prerender will return a 404 for those urls. This prevents unnecessary rendering of pages that shouldn’t be indexed.

When a query parameter is ignored, Prerender will strip off the part after the query string and serve the base URL to bots instead.
For example:
www.xyz.com/page1?param=000 → Prerender will serve www.xyz.com/page1 to the bots, ignoring the param value.

Please find more information about our Ignore URL feature in here.

 

  • Address Soft 404 Pages. Identify and fix soft 404 pages to reduce unnecessary renders:
    1. Use the Soft 404 Checker Tool to identify if your server returns the correct 404 status code.
    2. Follow the steps on how to fix soft404: Why is a 404 page is cached as 200?
  • Skip Static File Extensions from Prerendering. Configure the integration to skip extension files from being prerendered. Files like .js, .css, .xml, .png, .jpg, .jpeg, .gif, .svg, .pdf, .woff, and .ttf should not be rendered and must be excluded. These are already configured to be excluded in our integration guide, but in case they aren't, make sure to add a rule to prevent them from being processed.

 

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