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7/12/2026
Pre-rendering a 160-post React SPA with react-snap: the gotcha that silently breaks your SEO

Pre-rendering a 160-post React SPA with react-snap: the gotcha that silently breaks your SEO

Short summary

react-snap can silently fail mid-crawl when sharing memory with an open desktop Chrome instance, leaving routes as empty CSR shells that deploy as 200s with no content. The webpack build still exits 0, so CI doesn't catch it. Fix by quitting Chrome before building, asserting crawl counts in logs, and grepping output for real content before shipping.

  • react-snap gets SIGKILLed when desktop Chrome competes for memory, leaving routes as empty shells
  • Build still exits 0 so CI/CD doesn't flag the failure — indexing quality drops silently
  • Fix: quit Chrome, assert crawl count, grep for real content, never re-run on existing build

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