Page Rendering: how it happens and why search engines need it
The stages of discovery and analysis of web pages by search engines not only takes the form of the indexing process that we are already familiar with, but there is another decisive moment in which crawlers come into contact with what we publish: it is the rendering, the operation of interpreting and rendering the page graphically, which plays a crucial role in the way websites are viewed and indexed by search engines. This process may seem technical and complex, but it is important to understand it (at least superficially) because it is an essential component in ensuring that our website content is easily accessible and visible to both users and the search engines themselves. And so, with this quick guide we discover precisely how rendering works, why it is needed by search engines, and how it can affect SEO.
What is the rendering
Literally, rendering is the graphic encoding of the information on the page in HTML language, which are translated (rendered) so as to give an understandable form to the graphic elements that make up all the websites, each with its own characteristics.
In other words, in the Web context, the term rendering refers to the process by which search engines, such as Google, interpret and display the HTML code of a Web site in order to “see” the Web site in a manner similar to how a human visitor would see it, in order to then properly proceed to the stage of adding it to specific indexes.
To allow this process are the special rendering engines, rendering engines, which collect and digest the data packets coming from the server and transform the lines of code of the HTML language into graphical and functional elements, such as text blocks with hyperlinks, images, videos and other elements such as PDF files.
The keywords of rendering: definitions and clarifications
In more technical terms, rendering is the process of executing the JavaScript code of a web page to generate the visual layout we see when we visit a site: this process can be performed either on the client side (i.e., in the user’s browser) or on the server side.
Rendered HTML is more widely known as DOM, an abbreviation for Document Object Model: every web page has a DOM, which represents the initial HTML plus any changes made by JavaScript called from the HTML.
Client-side rendering means that the JavaScript code is executed in the user’s browser, whi