Dynamic rendering

Rakkas uses React's streaming SSR features which means that it sends chunks of a page's HTML as soon as they are available instead of waiting until everything is fully rendered. This provides a great user experience but it may trip up bots and crawlers. To avoid harming SEO, Rakkas implements dynamic rendering. It simply means that Rakkas will sniff the user agent and if it is a bot, it will render the page fully instead of streaming. This also makes sure that response headers, response status, and document head tags are all set correctly.

Currently Rakkas checks for the following strings in the user agent to determine if it is a bot:

  • bot
  • check
  • cloud
  • crawler
  • curl
  • download
  • facebookexternalhit
  • flipboard
  • google
  • heritrix
  • ia_archiver
  • monitor
  • perl
  • preview
  • python
  • qwantify
  • scan
  • spider
  • tumblr
  • vkshare
  • wget
  • whatsapp
  • yahoo