We are pleased to announce the rollout of a major upgrade to SEO page rendering engine used for all SuiteCommerce and SuiteCommerce Advanced sites. Dubbed ‘Prerender V2’, the upgrade includes a number of significant improvements:

  • Support for modern versions of JavaScript syntax, which, at the time of writing, is ECMAScript2025
  • Fewer errors, particularly those related to JavaScript syntax errors
  • Improved rendering performance
  • Better operation, such as improved efficiency and a reduction in resource usage

Overview of the SEO Page Generator

As a reminder, the SEO page generator is a key part of SuiteCommerce infrastructure. SuiteCommerce uses a single-page application (SPA) to render the website for users when they visit. This involves sending them an HTML page to act as a frame, with links to JavaScript to build the SPA in the browser.

However, many search engines and other friendly bots cannot render JavaScript, and so server-side rendering (SSR) is used instead. SSR takes the requested page’s resources, processes it on NetSuite servers, and then sends the final HTML web page to the bot. This means that search engines are able to understand your page’s content and index your site for users of their service. This is an important service that supports your site’s SEO.

Improved Rendering Engine

In order to generate the HTML for these bots, a web browser is required. The choice of web browser and its version plays an important part in the final output of a webpage. If it is significantly different from what the typical user uses then rendering differences can start to appear, and in increasing frequency.

With Prerender V2, we have updated the browser in the SSR service to a modern Chrome browser, reflecting the ubiquity of this browser among real users of the web. This means that your SPA should render almost identically regardless of whether it is rendered in a user’s browser or the SSR service.

Accordingly, this means that SuiteCommerce now supports modern ECMAScript syntax.

At the time of writing, this means we now support ECMAScript2025 — so, if you’ve ever wanted to use let, const, arrow functions, spread syntax, for...of loops, and more, now is your chance, as they will be correctly rendered in the pages that are sent to search engines.

Fewer JavaScript Errors

Despite documenting the limitations of the old rendering engine, many developers still continued to use unsupported ECMAScript, causing syntax errors to appear frequently. JavaScript errors can interrupt the rendering process and prevent a page from rendering correctly, serving an incomplete or incorrect page to a search engine, causing SEO problems.

Accordingly, a consequence of this upgrade is that the vast majority of JavaScript syntax errors logged in the outputs of SSR pages have now been eliminated. This will improve your site’s SEO, so long as your syntax is error free.

Improved Rendering Performance

When running large-scale comparison tests, we noticed that in addition to fewer errors and better quality pages, there was a significant improvement in the time it takes to render pages; in particular, the timing bucket with the biggest improvement was in the ‘less than 1.8 seconds’ bucket.

Search engine crawlers typically have a set budget of time they will spend indexing a site, and so by improving the time it takes to render pages, we can serve more of your site’s pages to the crawler within the allotted time, boosting your site’s SEO.

As the rendering performance is now improved, we have reduced the rendering timeout to 10 seconds.

Smoother Operation

We have made significant ‘behind-the-scenes’ improvements to the overall infrastructure, which reduces the footprint of the servers and improves their reliability. These changes make the service more efficient to operate, as well as helping to ensure that rare problems, such as out-of-memory errors, occur even less frequently.

Next Steps

For most customers, there is nothing you need to do.

At the time of writing, only a minority of sites have not been migrated to the new infrastructure as we have identified issues with these sites that should be addressed before they are moved over. Customers who own the accounts associated with the sites will be notified about what they should do next.

For everyone else, if you want to check your site’s SEO output, you can refer to our documentation on working with the SEO page generator debug log. Your logs should now include a line that says, Got a response from Prerender V2. If you haven’t tested your site’s SEO output recently, now’s a good time.

Other than that, happy coding!