Quick Start Guide

Overview

This guide walks you through setting up RndrKit for your website. By the end, search engine bots will receive fully rendered HTML versions of your pages.

What you will need:

• A RndrKit account (sign up at rndrkit.io)
• Access to your domain's DNS settings
• Your site's origin URL (e.g., your-app.lovable.app or your-app.vercel.app)

Step 1: Sign Up and Log In

Create your account at rndrkit.io. You can sign in with Google, GitHub, or a magic-link email. Once signed in, you will be taken to the dashboard.

Step 2: Add Your Domain

From the dashboard, click Add Domain and enter the following:

• Your Domain: The domain where your site is live — just the domain name, no https:// or www. (e.g., example.com)
• Origin URL: Where your application is actually hosted (e.g., https://your-app.lovable.app)

Your Domain:  example.com
Origin URL:   https://your-app.lovable.app

Click Continue to DNS Setup. You will be taken to a DNS setup screen showing the exact records to add for your domain.

For detailed instructions, see Adding Domains.

Step 3: Configure DNS

You need to point your domain to RndrKit. The exact records depend on whether you entered an apex domain (example.com) or a subdomain (www.example.com, app.example.com).

Apex domain (example.com) — add both records:

Subdomain (www.example.com or other) — add one CNAME:

On supported DNS providers (Cloudflare, Route 53, DNSimple, Netlify DNS, Vercel DNS), you can use an ALIAS or apex CNAME pointing to rndrkit.io instead of the A record. Most registrar DNS (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Hostinger, etc.) does not support this — use the A record.

Cloudflare users: Set all records to DNS only (gray cloud). Do not enable the orange cloud proxy — it will cause Cloudflare Error 1014.

DNS changes can take up to 48 hours to propagate, but typically take effect within minutes.

For provider-specific instructions, see DNS Configuration.

Step 4: Verify DNS and SSL

Once DNS is configured, return to the onboarding panel and click Verify DNS. RndrKit checks that your records resolve correctly and then provisions an SSL certificate automatically.

You can track status on your domain's detail page:

• The domain card shows Active once both DNS and SSL are ready (otherwise Inactive).
• The Settings tab shows SSL status separately: Active, Pending Validation, Pending, or Failed. A Verify SSL link lets you re-check status manually.

If the certificate is not issued within a few minutes of DNS propagation, see SSL Verification for troubleshooting.

Step 5: Test Bot Rendering

Once your domain is active, verify that pre-rendering is working by simulating a bot request:

curl -s -A "Googlebot/2.1" "https://www.example.com/" | head -100

You should see fully rendered HTML with your page content, meta tags, and structured data. Compare this with a normal request:

curl -s "https://www.example.com/" | head -100

The normal request should return your SPA shell (the origin response), while the Googlebot request returns the pre-rendered version.

Step 6: Warm Your Cache (Optional)

To ensure bots get fast responses from the start, you can pre-warm your cache for important pages. Open your domain from the Domains list and go to the Cache tab to render your homepage and key landing pages.

See Cache Warming for details.

What Happens Next

With RndrKit active on your domain:

1. Search engine bots visit your site and receive fully rendered HTML. Google, Bing, and others can now index all your content, meta tags, and structured data.
2. Social media crawlers (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) receive proper Open Graph tags, so your link previews display correctly.
3. Human visitors are proxied to your origin server and experience your site exactly as before.

Verify in Google Search Console

After a few days, check Google Search Console to confirm that Google is indexing your pages correctly:

1. Go to URL Inspection and enter one of your page URLs.
2. Click Test Live URL to see what Google sees.
3. The rendered HTML should show your full page content.

You can also use the Coverage report to monitor how many pages are being indexed over time.

Next Steps

• Dashboard Overview -- Learn your way around the dashboard
• Analytics -- Monitor which bots are visiting your site
• SEO Audit -- Check your pages for common SEO issues
• Sitemaps -- Generate and submit a sitemap for your site