SSR enhances SEO and your site’s ranking by ensuring search bots from Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and similar can access your content. Caching reduces server load and response times. This guide covers SSR and caching configuration in Salesforce B2C Commerce when using Algolia’s SFRA cartridge (versions 24.3.2 and later) for rendering search and browse results.

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Disadvantages of SSR

Despite the benefits of better indexing and ranking on public search engines, there are some trade-offs you need to consider:
  • Increased rendering time since each SSR request requires an Algolia API call.
  • Search volume impact. SSR may increase Algolia search usage, depending on the traffic from search engine bots.
  • May affect the Salesforce Commerce Cloud quota usage. Ensure you have enough service api.dw.net.HTTPClient.send() quota to handle SSR requests. This shouldn’t be a major concern because SSR is only enabled for search engine crawler bots and doesn’t usually generate as much traffic as user queries.

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Server-side rendering implementation

To enable and customize SSR with caching:
  1. Enable SSR. Set the EnableSSR custom preference to true in the Algolia Business Manager module custom preferences.
  2. Declare __primary_category as an attribute for faceting in the Algolia dashboard to support SSR for category pages.
  3. Configure SSR triggers. By default, search engine bots trigger SSR for search result and category listing pages. You can customize this behavior and trigger SSR based on specific conditions. For example, you can enable SSR for specific user agents or request headers.
    js
    // Disable SSR for specific IP addresses
var restrictedIPS = ["xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx", "yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy"];
var clientIp = request.httpHeaders.get("true-client-ip");
if (
  algoliaData.getPreference("EnableSSR") &&
  searchEngineBots.test(req.httpHeaders.get("user-agent")) &&
  restrictedIPS.indexOf(clientIp) === -1
) {
  // Fetch and transform server-side results
  var hits =
    require("*/cartridge/scripts/algoliaSearchAPI").getServerSideHits(
      query,
      type,
      "products",
    );
  hits =
    require("*/cartridge/scripts/algolia/helper/ssrHelper").transformItems(
      hits,
    );
}

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Cache

Effective caching mitigates SSR performance costs, reducing server load and improving response times. The SFRA cartridge caches pages and Algolia SSR responses with the SearchController.

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With cache

  • Improved response times due to faster serving of cached pages
  • Reduced server load because of a minimized load for frequently accessed pages
  • Lower search volume impact by reducing SSR search requests to Algolia.

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Without cache

  • Increased server load due to per-request page rendering
  • May increase Algolia search volume depending on the crawler requests traffic on your site.

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Cache implementation

  1. Use the SearchController page cache
  2. Optimize Cache Invalidation: Ensure that cached pages are properly invalidated and updated when your content changes. This means the cache is always up-to-date and search engine bots can retrieve the latest content from your site.
  3. Cache Invalidation. Use the invalidateCache job step to invalidate the cache for specific pages or all pages by adding it before indexing steps in the job.
Don’t use the CacheMgr Class for caching Algolia Results. Use the SearchController page cache instead to simplify caching and invalidation.

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Events and analytics

  • Event Tracking. SSR requests don’t contain user tokens. This means SSR doesn’t trigger events that would influence the training of AI models for user-facing search ranking optimizations.
  • Analytics: enableAnalytics is false by default to avoid including crawler bot requests in events tracking and analytics.