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Why has Prerender stopped rendering or recaching my pages?

When Prerender stops rendering, AI crawlers and search engines may see outdated or missing content — here's how to find the cause and fix it.

TL;DR

Prerender rendering can pause for three reasons: your Starter trial ended without a payment method added, you manually paused automatic recaching in your dashboard, or your account was canceled. When rendering is paused, AI crawlers and search engines requesting uncached pages receive errors or outdated content instead of fresh rendered HTML — which may affect your visibility in AI-generated answers and search results. The fix depends on the cause: add a payment method, re-enable recaching in Advanced Settings, or contact support to reactivate your account.

What happens when rendering is paused

When rendering is paused, Prerender stops adding new pages to the cache and stops refreshing existing cached pages. Any AI crawler or search engine requesting an uncached page receives an error response instead of rendered HTML.

⚠️ If rendering has been paused for an extended period, AI crawlers and search engines requesting uncached pages will receive errors or outdated content. This may affect your visibility in AI-generated answers and search results.

Cause 1: Your Starter trial has ended

If you're on the Starter trial and don't add a payment method before the trial ends, your plan is automatically canceled and rendering stops immediately.

To fix it:

  1. Log in to your Prerender dashboard.
  2. Go to Billing > Billing Info and open the Payment Method tab.
  3. Add your payment details to reactivate the plan.

ℹ️ Not sure the Starter plan is right for your site? Contact support@prerender.io or go to Support > Contact Support in your dashboard for help choosing the right plan.

ℹ️ If you're on a paid plan (not a Starter trial), reaching your included render limit does not pause rendering. Rendering continues and additional pages are charged as extra renders on your next invoice.

When bot requests are blocked due to a lapsed trial, service.prerender.io returns HTTP 429 with the response header X-Prerender-Reject-Reason: free-limit-reached. If you're seeing this response, check your plan status in the dashboard first.

Cause 2: Automatic recaching is paused in your dashboard

You or someone on your team may have paused automatic recaching directly in your Prerender dashboard. When recaching is paused, existing cached pages stop being refreshed — but no error is returned to bots. They receive the most recent cached version, which becomes increasingly outdated over time.

To fix it:

  1. In your Prerender dashboard, go to Advanced Settings.
  2. Locate the Recaching toggle.
  3. If it's inactive, switch it back on to resume automatic cache refreshing.

ℹ️ Only pause recaching intentionally — for example, during major site maintenance or a large content migration. Re-enable it as soon as the maintenance window is over.

Cause 3: Your account is canceled

If your Prerender account has been canceled, all rendering and recaching stop immediately. Requests to service.prerender.io return:

  • HTTP 503 Service Unavailable
  • Header: X-Prerender-Reject-Reason: invalid-x-prerender-token-provided

To fix it:

Contact support@prerender.io to check whether your account is eligible for reactivation.

⚠️ If you don't plan to reactivate, remove the Prerender integration from your site within 30 days of cancellation. Leaving the integration in place after cancellation means AI crawlers and search engines will receive errors for every request — which may cause pages to drop from search and AI indexes. See canceled or suspended account for more detail.

Verify rendering has resumed

After applying a fix, confirm that Prerender is actively rendering and caching pages again.

Run a quick test using curl with a bot User-Agent:

curl -v -A googlebot https://yoursite.com/your-page

Look for Prerender response headers in the output. If they're present, rendering is active.

✅ Rendering has resumed when new cached pages appear in your Prerender dashboard within a few minutes of crawler requests, and your dashboard no longer shows a plan or billing issue.

If you're still seeing 429 or 503 responses after applying a fix, see how to avoid 429 error codes with Prerender for further troubleshooting steps.

💬 Still need help?
If you're not sure what's causing your rendering to pause, or you need help reactivating your account, our support team can help.
→ Contact us at support@prerender.io

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