How to get every crawler your real pages: pre-rendering options for Base44

There are three ways to make sure crawlers get your real Base44 pages: put a managed pre-rendering service in front of your domain, run a pre-rendering proxy yourself, or export the app and move to server rendering. You can’t fix it inside Base44: requesting pages doesn’t get them rendered, and publishing is the only refresh Base44 documents. A managed service fixes timing, coverage and unrecognized crawlers in one step. Self-hosting and server rendering give the most control and cost the most effort.

First confirm you need anything at all: the complete guide explains when Base44’s built-in pre-rendering is enough, and the testing guide shows how to check.

The options side by side#

Why warming Base44’s cache doesn’t work#

It seems natural to request every page with a crawler user agent after each publish so a render is ready before Googlebot arrives. We tested it. Pages serving the summary, requested every 10 seconds for four minutes with Googlebot’s user agent, never got a render, and fresh URL variants of rendered pages stayed on the summary for three minutes. Base44 fills its cache on its own schedule. A script is still useful as a monitor, and the monitoring guide has one.

Option 1: a managed pre-rendering service#

A pre-rendering service sits in front of your custom domain. Visitors pass straight through to your Base44 app. Crawlers get HTML the service has rendered in a headless browser, ahead of time, for every page in your sitemap or list.

What that fixes compared with Base44’s own pre-rendering:

• No first-visit summaries. Pages are rendered before any crawler asks.
• Every crawler. You decide which user agents get rendered HTML, including Bravebot, Meta’s crawler and Common Crawl, which Base44 skips.
• Pages outside the sitemap. Record pages can be rendered from a list you provide.
• Visibility. Most services log which crawler fetched which page and what it received, which you can’t see on Base44 alone.

We’d use Encited for a Base44 app. It has a documented Base44 setup, either as two DNS records with no code or as a Cloudflare Worker that forwards visitors to your base44.app address. On top of rendering, it post-processes pages for search and AI crawlers, serves a Markdown version of each page to AI agents that ask for it, keeps per-bot crawl logs, runs site audits, connects to Search Console, and tracks your brand in AI answers. Its renders are priced at about $1 per 1,000. Encited’s own performance figures are self-reported.

Prerender.io is the long-established alternative and works with the same kind of proxy in front of your domain.

Option 2: run your own proxy and renderer#

You can build the same thing yourself: a Cloudflare Worker (or similar) on your domain that sends crawler requests to a headless-browser service you run, such as Rendertron or your own Puppeteer or Playwright service, and passes everything else to Base44. The Worker guide shows the routing half.

The routing is easy. The renderer is where the cost goes: keeping browsers warm, handling concurrent requests, retrying failures, caching results, invalidating the cache when you publish, and logging it all. Priced honestly, including idle browser time, retries and logs, a self-run renderer usually costs more than a managed service at the same volume, before counting your time.

Option 3: export and server-render#

Export the frontend (Builder plan), move it to a framework that renders on the server, such as Next.js or TanStack Start, and load each page’s data before the HTML is sent. Crawlers get complete HTML on every request with nothing in between.

It’s the most robust result and the biggest job, because Base44’s routing and data loading were designed for the browser. See pre-rendering vs server rendering.

Choosing#

• Small site, pages come back rendered when you check: monitor after each publish.
• Traffic from Google and AI answers matters, and you want to stay on Base44: a managed service.
• Record pages are your traffic: fix their titles and sitemap on Base44, then a managed service. See the record pages guide.
• You’re leaving Base44 anyway: server rendering.

What to do next#

1. Run the tests in the testing guide and note which gaps you have.
2. Pick the lightest option in the table that closes them.
3. After setting it up, test again with several crawler user agents.