I strongly believe that (non Nextjs) SPAs are rubbish without prerendering - neither does SEO work, nor does link preview, and both are essential. So with this, Ive never understood why Netlify is stuck with prerendering in “beta” for ever. Isnt this something that needs more attention on your side?
The current prerendering being done by Netlify has serious deficiencies, which is why Ive been using prerender.io, and after the recent massive price increase by that service, have rolled my own. However - I’d be very happy if Netlify would provide this as a managed service at scale, even if I have to pay an incremental cost.
Please make the feature self-service at least, so that we don’t have to ask via support requests every time the external URL has to be changed. Esp if I face issues and need to make an instant change, waiting for support would take days.
The feature request is a good one, and I’ve passed it on to the product team, but I do not expect any changes in the near future around this service. Why’s that?
Most of our customers do not use prerendering - neither ours, nor external services such as prerender.io, and as we don’t charge for it, we don’t work on it a lot - so it hasn’t been a very high priority to move it past beta. I can’t speak to whether it will ever move past beta, since as a company we have many priorities right now and this isn’t particularly high for our general use case based on usage across our service being on a very small (single digit!) percentage of sites we host.
On the up side, as of this week, we can now set your entire account to automatically use an external prerendering service, which we’ll be happy to do even for your custom self-created service. Presumably then you’d never need a change to that URL, so the feature request is perhaps a bit less urgent; you would probably have hot-spare servers available with failover since this service is so critical for you.
Thank you Chris, I understand that it not important for Netlify given such low usage. That’s fair.
Most of our customers do not use prerendering
But thats surprising, would you be able to hazard a guess as to why’s that?
On the up side, as of this week, we can now set your entire account to automatically use an external prerendering service
Thank you. At the moment, I feel that per site control is better. Unless the scheme works like environment variables? Where an individual site may override the global/account settings?
Hi, @zehawki. About why the frequency of prerendering use is so low, I don’t have enough information to answer.
For second question about the account level prerendering, there is no user facing method to opt-out individual sites. There is a method where our support team can do so but nothing in the API or UI will allow this.