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Why Am I Seeing 403 or 404 Errors After Integrating Prerender?

403 or 404 errors after Prerender integration typically indicate missing tokens, blocked IPs, incorrect URL rewrites, or URL filters—review integration and account settings to resolve.

Overview

After integrating Prerender to improve SEO and performance by serving pre-rendered pages to bots, some users encounter 403 (Access Denied) or 404 (Not Found) errors. These errors mean Prerender’s crawler cannot successfully fetch or access the requested pages. This can impact how search engines crawl and index your site, potentially harming SEO and user experience.

Understanding the causes behind these errors is essential to quickly resolve them and ensure Prerender works as intended.

 

403 Status Code: Access Denied

This status code might be because your firewall blocks or rate-limits our crawler while trying to fetch your pages or because the Prerender token is not provided in the integration.

Here are some causes and solutions to fix it:

404 Status Code: Not Found

  • The URL rewrite part of the integration is incorrect

    • How to fix it: Check the CDN Analytics menu to see how the URL was rewritten and modify the rewrite section of your integration

  • The requested URL does not exist on the site

    • How to fix it: try to request another URL

  • There is a URL Ignore filter matching the requested URL

    • How to fix it: check if the requested URL matches any of the Ignored URL filters on your account

  • Test with Alternate URLs

    • Try requesting other known valid URLs to determine if the issue is URL-specific.

 

Additional Tips / Best Practices

  • Keep Your Firewall and CDN Updated
    Regularly update firewall rules to include new IPs or user-agent strings from Prerender if they change.

  • Use Logs and Analytics
    Monitor the Prerender dashboard logs, CDN analytics, and server logs to diagnose access problems quickly.

  • Avoid Overly Broad Ignore Filters
    Be precise when setting URL ignore filters to prevent accidentally blocking important pages.

  • Validate Integration After Changes
    Whenever you update middleware or proxy settings, test with known bot user-agents to confirm Prerender functions correctly.

Get Support

Still have questions or need help? We’re here for you!

If you’ve followed the troubleshooting steps and still can’t resolve the issue, feel free to reach out to our support team. You can contact us via:

To help us resolve your issue as quickly as possible, please gather and include any relevant information, such as:

  • Error messages you're seeing
  • Steps you've already taken to troubleshoot
  • Screenshots or screen recordings (if applicable)

Providing these details up front will help our team diagnose the problem more efficiently and get you back on track faster.

 

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