Google Says Dynamic Rendering Is A Workaround and Not A Long-Term Solution

Google has updated its help documentation on dynamic rendering to say “dynamic rendering is a workaround and not a long-term solution for problems with JavaScript-generated content in search engines. “Instead, we recommend that you use server-side rendering, static rendering, or hydration as a solution,” Google added.

Google announced dynamic rendering in 2018 as a way to help Google to crawl and index your JavaScript content. For the past few years, Googlers have been saying you should likely not go the dynamic rendering route because Google is much more capable of rendering JavaScript these days. Note, Google has always said this was a workaround but made large adjustments to the docs to urge this now.

In any event, Google made some significant changes to the help documentation on dynamic rendering, specifically at the top of the page. The page has a red disclaimer that reads:

Dynamic rendering is a workaround and not a long-term solution for problems with JavaScript-generated content in search engines. Instead, we recommend that you use server-side rendering, static rendering, or hydration as a solution.

The first section of the page was also updated to explain “Dynamic rendering is a workaround for websites where JavaScript-generated content is not available to search engines. A dynamic rendering server detects bots that may have problems with JavaScript-generated content and serves a server-rendered version without JavaScript to these bots while showing the client-side rendered version of the content to users.”

“Dynamic rendering is a workaround and not a recommended solution, because it creates additional complexities and resource requirements,” Google added.

Here is what the page looks like now (click to enlarge):

Here is what the page looked like previously (click to enlarge):

Forum discussion at Twitter.