I recently ran into an SEO problem while building a marketplace for Ionic templates and UI kits.

The stack looked reasonable at first:

React 18

React Router 7

Vite

Firebase Hosting

Firestore

react-snap for prerendering

The site worked perfectly for users but Google hated it and none of the pages were indexing.

After digging into Search Console, page source output, and prerender behaviour, I discovered several compounding problems that are easy to miss when building modern SPA marketplaces.

This post breaks down:

what was failing

why Google wasn’t indexing the site

and the architecture I ended up using to fix it

The Initial Problem

The homepage source initially looked something like this:

<body> <div id= "root" ></div> </body>

Enter fullscreen mode

Exit fullscreen mode

The visible content existed only after hydration.…