I’m working on a web application that relies heavily on AJAX calls and dynamic content loading. The main challenge I’m facing is making this content accessible to search engine crawlers, especially Google’s bot.
Since search engines have trouble indexing JavaScript-generated content, I need to implement a headless browser solution that can render the complete page with all AJAX responses and then generate static snapshots.
I’ve been looking into different options for .NET applications but most solutions I found either lack proper JavaScript execution capabilities or don’t integrate well with the ASP.NET framework.
Has anyone successfully implemented a headless browser solution for similar scenarios? What libraries or tools would you recommend for generating crawler-friendly versions of dynamic web pages in a .NET environment?
Had this exact issue two years back - our e-commerce site’s search rankings tanked because of heavy JavaScript. Tried a bunch of solutions and PuppeteerSharp worked best. It’s basically a .NET wrapper for Puppeteer and handles modern JS frameworks without breaking a sweat. Set up middleware that detects crawlers and serves them pre-rendered content while regular users get the dynamic version. Performance hit was brutal at first, but caching the rendered pages fixed that. Watch out for memory usage though - headless browsers eat resources like crazy, so make sure you’re disposing properly. Authentication was tricky since crawlers can’t log in, so we had to work around that. SEO improvements were pretty solid after about three months.
we’ve had good luck with selenium webdriver + chromedriver. it’s clunkier than puppeteer but way easier to set up if you already know selenium. downside is it’s slower and eats more resources, but it works fine for smaller sites.
Playwright for .NET is my go-to here. It’s built for modern web apps and handles SPAs way better than Selenium. The API’s cleaner than PuppeteerSharp, and debugging’s easy since you can run it in headed mode while developing. We set it up as a background service that pre-renders pages and caches them in Redis with TTL based on how often content updates. The tricky bit was handling state management and making sure the headless browser waits for all async operations before taking the snapshot. I used network idle detection plus custom JavaScript markers to know when rendering’s actually done. Memory usage stays reasonable if you recycle browser instances regularly and don’t keep too many contexts open at once.