Dynamic Rendering
Dynamic rendering is a technique that detects search engine crawlers and serves them a pre-rendered HTML version of a page, while serving the regular JavaScript-rendered version to human users.
Dynamic rendering was recommended by Google as a workaround for sites that could not implement SSR. A service like Rendertron or Prerender.io intercepts crawler requests (detected via User-Agent), renders the page in a headless browser, and returns the fully rendered HTML.
Google officially considers dynamic rendering a workaround, not a long-term solution, and has stated it is not cloaking as long as the content is substantially the same. However, with modern frameworks like Next.js providing SSR and SSG out of the box, dynamic rendering is rarely needed.
If you are using Next.js App Router, you do not need dynamic rendering — Server Components render on the server by default. Dynamic rendering is only relevant for legacy single-page applications (SPAs) that cannot be migrated to SSR frameworks.
Related terms
Server-Side Rendering (SSR)
Server-side rendering (SSR) is a technique where the web server generates the complete HTML for a page on each request, sending fully rendered content to the browser and search engine crawlers.
JavaScript SEO
JavaScript SEO is the practice of optimizing JavaScript-heavy web applications so that search engines can effectively crawl, render, index, and rank their content.
Renderability
Renderability is the ability of search engine crawlers to execute JavaScript and render a page's content as it would appear to a user in a browser.
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