Pre-render

It's often easier to create a normal single-page web application (SPA) by using React, Vue.js etc (see example). But what about SEO, initial page load time, and other optimizations?

The goal of this project is to alow you generate static .html pages for your single-page app. You just build your project as normal, assuming that it compiles into the /build (or /dist) folder, then prepare the list of relative URL paths that need to be pre-rendred and pass that info to pre-render, it will load /build/index.html in a headless Chrome browser, iterate over the list of provided URL path strings and save each page to a corresponding .html file.

How to Use

You need to tweak your app, to expose window.prerender handler, that may look something like this:

window.preprender = (path) => new Promise(resolve => {
  history.push(path);
  /* make sure that the client-side rendering is complete, then */
  resolve(document.documentElement.outerHTML);
});

Then build your project (npm run build) and run the following script:

const prerender = require('pre-render');
 
prerender('./build', [
  '/',
  '/about',
  /* ... */
]);

Now, you can deploy the contents of the /build folder to GitHub Pages, Firebase, or some other CDN hosting, yet making sure that the search engines will be able to crawl your site.

License

Copyright © 2017-present Kriasoft. This source code is licensed under the MIT license found in the LICENSE.txt file.

---

Made with ♥ by Konstantin Tarkus (@koistya, blog) and contributors