Prerender WordPress Plugin – Let Googlebot Render Your Site Perfectly

Why you should care

JavaScript is on the rise when it comes to designing websites, and most of the modern WordPress themes have fancy animations, functions and elements that are built with it.

For us at Hekkup, we started to notice that some of the chosen themes on a few sites affected us negatively.

Affecting us negatively meaning it did affect our ranking positions, negatively.

For example, on this specific site, we use quite a bit of animations to load the text and images seamlessly. And when we ran the first version through Google they were not able to render any of the JavaScript elements.

Which meant they couldn’t see 95% of the content on the homepage and other important landing pages. So how did we sort it out without switching theme, layout and feel of the site?

We installed prerender. Almost automatically, it all started to render perfectly and today we have no rendering-related issues.

Seems too easy right?

Well, I got all ecstatic and thought we should ease this process and be able to enable it on all our affiliate websites in a easy manner, without manually editing .htaccess and adding a meta tag on all sites.

So we developed a plugin to do it for us. And now we are releasing it to all, completely free.

What is prerender?

Prerender is the process in serving bots with one file of the page they’re requesting, and serving the actual users with another file.

We want to serve Google with the easiest file possible, so that they can render it quickly and then move onto the next one. But also to make sure they are able to render all of the content since we ultimately want the bots to see exactly what the users see.

This will increase our crawl rate and, at the same time, help us index content.

Download the plugin

The plugin is available on WordPress.org and can be downloaded here.

Or, simply go onto your WordPress site, click “Plugins”, “Add New” and then enter “Prerender” – make sure it says “By Hekkup”.

How to install the plugin

To install this plugin:

1. Make a backup of your site (just in case)
2. Register an account at prerender.io (it’s free up to 200 URLs)
3. Download the plugin
4. Upload the plugin to the wp-content/plugins directory, or by following instructions above
5. Go to “Plugins” in your WordPress admin, enter credentials and then click Activate.
6. Done!

Easy enough right?

Let us know any feedback you might have on the plugin, and we will make sure to answer or address the potential bugs.

​Frequently Asked Questions

Frequently asked questions regarding the prerender WordPress plugin will be answered here.

Is Mobile Adaptive Rendering available?

Yes! However, you need to email [email protected]render.io to get it activated on your site. Our plugin supports the use of it.