The 'temporary' workaround that aged into a liability

The 'temporary' workaround that aged into a liability

A B2B software site set up dynamic rendering in 2021 — bots got prerendered HTML, users got the SPA. It worked. Then in 2024, rankings started a slow, unexplained slide.

Nothing had changed on their end. That was the point. Google had quietly deprecated dynamic rendering as a recommended approach, and their renderer had gotten dramatically better at JavaScript — but the prerender middleware had grown brittle.

We inspected what bots received. The prerender service was timing out on their now-heavier pages and serving partial, half-rendered HTML with missing structured data and truncated content. The service was tuned for a 2021 page weight and never revisited.

Dynamic rendering isn't a set-and-forget solution; it's a maintenance liability that decays as your app grows and the prerender service falls behind.

Fix: ripped out dynamic rendering entirely, moved to proper SSR with hydration. One source of truth for bots and users.

Result: eliminated the timeout-induced partials, rankings recovered to 2023 levels plus 11% over four months, and one entire class of incidents disappeared from the on-call rotation.