Understand SEO snapshots

SEO generates static snapshots every 24 hours or whenever changes are published. These snapshots provide a prerendered copy of a storefront page. However, as Commerce does not have control over how often a crawl happens, search engine results are not guaranteed to reflect the latest changes.

All key SEO settings from your client side rendered store are mirrored when OCC scripts generate HTML snapshots of your site, so you can be sure that signals sent to search engines are consistent. The default setting ensures prerendered snapshots are served to Googlebot and other search engine bots. However, you can modify your preferences and decide whether JavaScript client side rendered, or HTML, snapshots should be served to other crawlers.

As Commerce uses a JavaScript framework it is worth noting that all search engines have some limitations in terms of processing JavaScript and rendering JavaScript- heavy pages. In order to help search engines with crawling and indexing, Commerce renders the page and static snapshots of your pages directly to the search engine crawlers. These snapshots provide a prerendered copy of a storefront page. Prerendering aims to speed up the indexing of fresh content published in your store, such as, new product or collection pages.

Search engines (such as Google) regularly update URL information based on a strict timeout. When pages are provided to Google after the timeout, the request is canceled and the page is not updated. Therefore, Commerce uses prerendered snapshots in order to ensure storefront pages are delivered to Google as quickly as possible.

Commerce generates an already-rendered version of a storefront URL and stores a static copy of the page (excluding dynamic elements or JavaScript) on the server to ensure a fast retrieval. Note also that Commerce generates distinct snapshots for both mobile and desktop.

Your store's key SEO settings are mirrored when Commerce generates HTML snapshots of your site, ensuring that signals sent to search engines are consistent. The default setting ensures prerendered snapshots are served to search engine bots. However, you can modify your preferences and decide if JS client side rendered, or HTML snapshots should be served to other crawlers.