No-code DNS setup

Root vs www

Choose one canonical hostname and avoid crawler requests bypassing Prerender Buddy.

Root vs www

Root and www are different hostnames.

Example
1example.com
2www.example.com

Prerender Buddy protects the exact hostname you add. If you add www.example.com, crawler requests to example.com are not automatically protected.

Use www as the protected hostname when possible.

Request flow
1www.example.com -> Prerender Buddy
2example.com -> redirect to https://www.example.com

The redirect should preserve the path.

Request flow
1https://example.com/blog/post
2  -> https://www.example.com/blog/post

How to test

Terminal
1curl -I https://example.com/blog/post
2curl -I -A "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" https://www.example.com/blog/post

The root domain should redirect. The www response should show Prerender Buddy headers such as x-prerender-cache.

When to configure both

Configure both root and www only if you intentionally want both hostnames to serve pages directly. For most sites, one canonical hostname plus a redirect is cleaner for users, crawlers, and Search Console.

Ready to check the setup?

After DNS or middleware is deployed, use Verify Installation from the site dashboard and check the logs tab for crawler requests.

Still stuck? Email support@prerenderbuddy.com.

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