oc-prerender-plugin

Single page applications provide a great user experience, but are notorious for their poor SEO. This plugin bridges that gap by integrating October with prerender.io. This allows websites like Google, Facebook, and Twitter to crawl your website perfectly, without sacrificing the experience of a SPA.

Installation

Install the plugin by running the following commands from your root October directory

git clone git@github.com:scottbedard/oc-prerender-plugin.git plugins/bedard/prerender
composer update

Next, configure your prerender token by adding the following to your .env file

PRERENDER_TOKEN=yoursecrettoken

If you are using a self-hosted service, add the server address to your .env file

PRERENDER_URL=http://example.com

You can disable the service by adding the following to your .env file

PRERENDER_ENABLE=false

Recaching pages

This plugin exposes a bedard.prerender.recache event that can be used to recache URLs. For example, say you want to recache blog posts when the content is changes. You could add the following to your Plugin.php file achieve this.

public function boot()
{
    \RainLab\Blog\Models\Post::extend(function ($model) {
        $model->bindEvent('afterSave', function () use ($model) {
            \Event::fire('bedard.prerender.recache', 'https://example.com/blog/' . $model->slug);
        });
    });
}

Customizing

Prerendering can be customized by adding the following to a configuration file at config/bedard/prerender/config.php. Check the October documentation for information on setting environment specific configuration. Click here to see the default configuration.

Whitelist

If a whitelist is supplied, only url’s containing a whitelist path will be prerendered. An empty array means that all URIs will pass this filter. Note that this is the full request URI, so including starting slash and query parameter string.

'whitelist' => [
    '/frontend/*' // only prerender pages starting with '/frontend/'
]

Blacklist

If a blacklist is supplied, all url’s will be prerendered except ones containing a blacklist path. By default, a set of asset extensions are included. Note that this is the full request URI, so including starting slash and query parameter string.

'blacklist' => [
    '/api/*' // do not prerender pages starting with '/api/'
]

User Agents

Requests from crawlers that do not support _escaped_fragment_ will nevertheless be served with prerendered pages. You can customize the list of crawlers using the following config entry.

'crawler_user_agents' => [
    'googlebot',
]

FAQ

Do I need prerendering?

If you’re writing traditional themes using October’s AJAX framework, then probably not. This plugin is designed for themes like Vuetober, where the majority of rendering is done on the client side.

Isn’t this what SSR is for?

Yes, but server-rendered applications bring with them a lot of baggage. For starters they often require a Node server, complicated build steps, and that you write “universal code”. Prerendering achieves many of the benefits of SSR, with significantly fewer moving parts.

How can I verify the integration is working?

Start by checking out the prerender.io testing docs. To see how your site looks to different crawlers, try changing your user agent to something like “Googlebot”. Click here to learn how to do this in Chrome.

Credit

Many thanks to jeroennoten for providing the middleware used in this plugin.

License

MIT